Croquet is a powerful open source software technology that, in the form of the Croquet Software Developer's Kit (Croquet SDK), can be used by experienced software developers to create and deploy deeply collaborative multi-user online vitual world applications on and across multiple operating systems and devices. Derived from Squeak, the Croquet system features a peer-based messaging protocol that dramatically reduces the need for server infrastructures to support virtual world deployment and makes it easy for software developers to create deeply collaborative applications. Cobalt is a National Science Foundation-sponsored effort to develop an open source virtual world browser and authoring toolkit application based on the Croquet technology.

Croquet's first multi-user WAN test at Boston University's High Performance Computing lab (David P. Reed at center, Mark McCahill, far right)

• Become involved in the effort to build Cobalt
• Contribute Cobalt code/bug fixes.
• Join the Croquet Consortium as an individual or institutional member.
• Contact us and let us know how you'd like to help.

Croquet capabilities demo.

More videos here.

Cobalt: A new community-based Croquet application development effort.

• Consortium email address changed to croquetconsortium at gmail dot com (for spam filtering reasons)(July 2008).

• Duke's Julian Lombardi Receives National Science Foundation Award to Advance Cobalt (June 2008) More.

• Qwaq Makes Available XML Specification for Croquet-based Virtual Worlds (May 2008) More.

• Cobalt Metaverse Browser and Toolkit Pre-alpha Available for Community-Based Development (March 2008) More.

• Croquet Selected as Next Generation Immersive Education Platform (January 2008) More.

• Duke Receives $100,000 Mellon Award (December 2007) More.

• UNC Joins Croquet Consortium (December 2007)

• Intel Joins Croquet Consortium (August 2007)

• Earlier news