News Releases
09/22/08 - Elizabeth Wendland joins Duke University as collaborative systems developer
Elizabeth Wendland, former Croquet lead at the University of Minnesota, has joined the Duke University Office of Information Technology as a collaborative systems developer. Elizabeth will be working to develop enterprise level support for secure collaborative tools and environments that will integrate with Cobalt to provide robust, secure, and richly featured virtual worlds for education.
09/01/08 - John Dougan joins Duke University as Cobalt development lead
John Dougan, experienced Croquet developer has joined Julian Lombardi’s software development team at Duke’s Department of Computer Science as a lead developer for the NSF and Andrew W. Mellon funded effort to develop an open source virtual world browser based on Croquet technology.
06/01/08 - Duke Receives NSF Award to Support Cobalt Application Development
Duke University computer scientist, Julian Lombardi, has received an NSF Small Grant for Exploratory Research in the amount of $200K to advance "An Open and Scalable Croquet-Based Collaboration Infrastructure for Support of 3-D Simulation-Based Research and Education.
03/05/08 - Cobalt application made available for community-based development
Cobalt is an emerging open source and multi-platform metaverse browser and toolkit application being built using the open source Croquet SDK. A pre-alpha build of the Cobalt application is being made freely available to the emerging virtual worlds community by Duke University and its partners. The development partners which include The University of Minnesota, The University of British Columbia, Duke University, Wake Forest University, North Carolina State University, and The University of North Carolina among others. The intent of this effort is to foster a viable broad-based community software development effort leading to secure and open source virtual world technologies supporting the needs of education and research.
01/12/08 - Immersive Education Initiative Selects Croquet as Next Generation Immersive Education Platform
On January 12th, it was announced at The Boston Media-Grid Summit that the Immersive Education Initiative has selected Croquet as one of three official "next generation" immersive education platforms. The Immersive Education Initiative is an international collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia companies, and foundations that are working together to define and develop open standards, best practices, platforms, and communities of support for virtual reality and game-based learning and training systems. The Initiative will now direct both funding and programming resources towards the development and deployment of open source Cobalt technologies and open source Cobalt-based educational applications. Selection criteria for this important honor included the following: 1) support for the Windows and Macintosh operating systems; 2) availability as open source code; 3) vendor-neutral client and server architectures (no vendor lock-in); 4) stable and reliable runtime implementations; 5) integrated text chat and voice chat; 6) high resolution graphics; 7) multi-user support for collaboration; 8) highly customizable avatars that support high resolution graphics and body animation (gestures); and 9) support for user-created content. The other two immersive education platforms selected were Sun's open source Project Wonderland client and the now open sourced Second Life client.
12/10/07 - Duke Receives $100,000 Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded Duke University a $100,000 prize for leadership and development work to advance Croquet in the open source. The prize was one of ten presented as part of the second annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC) which are given each year to not‐for‐profit organizations for leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with application to scholarship in the arts and humanities.
The award was presented at the Fall Task Force meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information in Washington D.C. by Sir Timothy Berners‐Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and the inventor of the World Wide Web. Duke’s MATC award was one of three that received the top prize of $100,000. The other award winners received prizes of $50,000 each. Award recipients were selected by the MATC Award Committee, which included Berners‐Lee, Mitchell Baker (CEO, Mozilla Corporation), John Seely Brown (former Chief Scientist, Xerox Corp.), Vinton G. Cerf (Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google, Inc.), John Gage (Chief Researcher and Director of the Science Office, Sun Microsystems, Inc.), and Tim O’Reilly (Founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media).
