Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

Croquet SDK 1.0 is released! Kudos to the Croquet development team, and the Open Croquet Consortium. I first learned this from Julian's blog. It's great to see Croquet is finally out of it's beta series. This new release is more stable and easier to use. A lots of bugs I have experienced in the beta releases have disappeared (e.g. Single right click “teleport” you). I can't wait to generate collaborative working spaces in the new version for the Arts Mertaverse project.

Here are a few new functions would defenitley benefit the Arts Metaverse Project:

1). The “mini-world” object can serve as a “portal” to enter a new space. This would allow us generate “previews” of the ancient world and the students can “jump” into the world at any time by walk over the mini-world object.

2). Users can easily create light sources in the world. This will allow the visitors to light up a “torch” in a dark world. This way and the world creators can focus on more precise implementations of the settings. (e.g. I want to create a cave, but don't want to put any lights in there to mis-lead the visitors. It is important for the visitor to explore the dark space in their own manner...)
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3). Simple primitives like cube and sphere can be created inside of the Croquet world. But with the mesh import features, you don't really need to us this to build 3D objects inside of the Croquet World. I suppose this is for the people whom don't want fiddle around with Blender or 3D Max...
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4). Use “ctrl + A” to toggle the viewing perspectives. Thanks guys! How many times I heard the question “how do I get rid of the giant rabbit head so I can see the world better?!”
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5). Built-in camera and audio functions, use the KAT demo and goto new Video Camera Output and Microphone Output, you can instantly video conference with everyone in the world! I remember Julian was showing us this in UCLA. Unfortunately I don't have a camera installed on this machine, gonna try it out tomorrow with my co-workers
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6). “what is my location” instantly shows you network information of the terminal computer you are using, you can send “xml post card” like this:
where your friends can join your world instantly
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7). The “admin” menu gives you detailed system information about the world for debugging and traffic monitoring purposes.
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8). Last but not least, one can easily browse the world wide web from inside of the Croquet world by “new” -> “desktop” -> “the url to the web site” in the KAT Demo
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Two new features I would like to explore more but no time right now is: “Robot Play/Record” and “Remote Desktop Configuration”. I believe the “Robot Play/Record” function allows you to record in-world activities such as avatar gestures and much more...
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These are just the obvious functions I could pick up in the last couple of hours. But I am sure after going through the programming tools more thouroughly tomorrow, more exciting features will come out.

BTW, did I mention that I am blogging this from inside of Croquet?!
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