Croquet, originally uploaded by notmarian.

Just attended a session on Croquet at the IOC 2008 conference. Mark McCahill (Duke) discussed this open source 3-D virtual environment for education.

Totally fascinating take on 3-D virtual worlds from a veteran techie who developed some very early web apps like Gopher. Yes, he does think that people paying money for virtual “land” on a grid is ridiculous because virtual space is a limitless commodity. However, for those of us in Community Colleges who do not have adequate computing infrastructure and massive IT departments…well, that topic is best saved for another day. These commercial virutal worlds are a place where we can experiment with very little risk and without our partners in IT suffering nervous breakdowns.

The most striking difference between Croquet and other 3-D virtual worlds like Second Life, at least to me, is that it is not a client-server application. It is peer-to-peer, meaning that instead of us all interacting with a server, we are interacting with one another’s computers! There would not be a burden on a server network or a bandwidth problem because we would, in theory, be simply passing “copies” of the world from computer to computer. A server would keep a back-up of the world and at least one Croquet computer keeps the latest copy of the world alive at all times for people to connect to. Of course, this is my low-tech take on the Croquet infrastructure.

Another totally exciting difference is that the institution “owns” the world their students and faculty create. So, no paying a company to keep your world alive and no risk of the world suddenly disappearing. The Croquet environment can be as visually rich as Second Life and even more robust so there’s much to be excited about. However, the development burden on the institution would be a huge limitation; it would be one of those brick walls barring our way to innovative teaching that most of us have to deal with or succumb to.

From a librarian’s point of view, Croquet is very exciting. We can enhance our library’s collections, build upon them, re-package our content and so much more in a 3-D world that is “owned” by our institutions. Additionally, we could add this 3-D content to our collections. Not to mention that gone would be the content licensing issues that we face in commercial virtual worlds! We could really deliver our collections to our students in the virtual space. Swoon!

There’s about a million more points to make about Croquet and this post will be the first of many about this technology in the CC Librarian Blog. Go to to the Croquet Consortium Web-space to get all excited here: http://croquetconsortium.org/index.php/Main_Page