An Open and Scalable Croquet-Based Collaboration Infrastructure for Support of 3-D Simulation-Based Research and Education

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Research communities are increasingly turning to 3-D virtual world technologies as a means of supporting collaborative, simulation-based scientific discovery and education. The commercially available technologies, however, have adopted server-based architectural approaches to virtual world creation and deployment. These approaches significantly limit the capacity of scientific virtual organizations to meet their 3-D modeling, dynamic simulation, and real-time collaboration needs in a scalable fashion. This proposal adopts a unique approach to the challenges associated with the rapid creation and broad deployment of large scale interconnected 3-D virtual worlds and workspaces for research and education. Investigators will leverage the peer-to-peer communications protocols of the Croquet software development architecture to build a reference implementation of a peer-based open source 3-D browser / virtual world authoring toolkit. This toolkit will enable the rapid ad hoc creation of new virtual workspaces and support multi-site meetings among distributed research teams whose members will enjoy a sense of shared presence, a basis for non-verbal communication, a capacity for 3-D model sharing, along with collaborative document sharing and editing and networked telephony. The reference implementation will also provide a robust platform for modular interface development and a usable basis for further exploration in the area of scalable distributed collaboration and establish a basis for future research on: (1) optimal methods of supporting the ad hoc synchronous communication and collaboration needs of large numbers of researchers, educators, and students; and (2) ways of achieving large-scale, cost efficient proliferation of new interconnected and deeply capable virtual workspaces in support of research, education, and science outreach. Investigators will make the reference implementation freely available within the open source to stimulate the development and dissemination of shared cyberenvironments for the staging, observation and evaluation of collaborative decision-making, problem finding, and problem solving among members of distributed virtual organizations and educational communities.