Croquet - a collaboration system architecture

Abstract

Croquet is a computer software architecture built from the ground up with a focus on deep collaboration between teams of users. It is a totally open, totally free, highly portable extension to the Squeak (Ingalls et al., 2002) programming system. Croquet is a complete development and delivery platform for doing real collaborative work. There is no distinction between the user environment and the development environment. Croquet is focused on interactions inside of a 3D shared space that is used for context based collaboration, where each user can see all of the others and what their current focus is. This allows for an extremely compelling shared experience. A new collaboration architecture/protocol called TeaTime has been developed to enable this functionality. The rendering architecture is built on top of OpenGL (Woo et al., 1999).