lang.smalltalk.croquet.user (date)

["David Faught" <dave_faught@xxxxxxxxx>]

Peter Murray wrote:
>Good morning/evening everyone. I was recently introduced to
>Croquet through a presentation done by Julian at Ohio State
>University and am intrigued by the possibilities. And then this
>morning I was reading an article from /Library Journal/
>called "Meet the Gamers"
>(http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA516033). It is a broad
>introduction to how gaming technologies can be applied to
>learning, and goes into some detail about the Lineage multi-user
>online game.
>
>A couple of the researchers are from the University of Wisconsin,
>so I was curious (since that seems to be where a lot of Croquet
>work is done) if one can draw firm links between the Lineage and
>Croquet such that I can use the /Library Journal/ article to
>introduce Croquet to others in the library profession.

I am not a part of the association of universities that is playing a primary 
role in developing Croquet, but I have been a part of the public Croquet 
community for a while now.

Having read the "Meet The Gamers" article that you refer to, I can comment that 
I believe using Croquet very directly prompts people to do a lot of research 
through both online and traditional libraries.  I believe that it is a strong 
possibility for the future that Croquet could become a flagship environment for 
collaborative research.

At this point in Croquet's development, a lot of the research that I personally 
do is related to expanding the capabilities of Croquet itself, and so is 
usually in technical or educational areas.  Occasionally, I am prompted to look 
into "human factors" as they relate to using Croquet, so the emphasis is more 
in the area of psychology or biomechanics.

As far as bringing the library into Croquet, I would very much like to see the 
standard Web browser capabilities within Croquet expanded to allow for multiple 
concurrent collaborative browsers.  This would be a first step, from which the 
collaborative building and exploration of interactive simulations would greatly 
benefit.