Milestones in the Croquet startup adventure

After a year of prototypes and demonstrations, in 2018 we founded CEO Vision, which later became Croquet Corporation (and later yet Croquet Labs... but that's not important right now). This page uses captioned videos to present some of the things that were built along the way. My contributions were at the core of some projects, more peripheral on others.

1. CEO Vision: 3D information spaces

   David A Smith kicked everything off with an architecture for a 3D information-management environment that would run in a web browser. The idea was to build high-density information displays that took advantage of the increased resolutions that WebGL-enabled 3D worlds could now offer. David and I shared out the demo-building work; Chart Wall was one of mine.

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     Demo video · Watch · 2017

     CEO Vision Chart Wall

     A wall of about 200 stock charts, with linked maps for finding stocks by particular criteria. In this demo we build a simple portfolio, then examine how those stocks weathered the 2008 crisis.

2. ARCOS: connected rooms filled with interactive toys

   ARCOS is considered by us to be Croquet V - the fifth Croquet incarnation (the first being the Smalltalk version built by David and others in 2004). ARCOS had shared 3D rooms linked by portals, filled with interactive objects, and reachable from a phone in AR. I implemented ARCOS's event- and data-sharing backbone using CouchDB, which met our needs at the time. I was also the person keeping up with the ever-changing WebXR, so we could create AR experiences.

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     Demo video · Watch · 2018

     ARCOS

     ARCOS (the Augmented Reality Collaborative Operating System): shared 3D rooms that you travel between using portals, with embedded interactive objects including 3D particle systems, and usable through phone AR.

3. Croquet for replicated computation

   Croquet VI brought into the JavaScript world the essence of the Croquet approach: bit-identical replicated computation. When all clients start with identical state (and identical code), and compute state changes in response to a broadcast tick stream, they will always stay in perfect sync. External events, such as user input, are broadcast alongside the ticks and again handled identically by all clients.

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     Demo video · Watch · 2019–2022

     Croquet: replicated computation

     Every Croquet client starts from the same state, whether big raw data or a generated world, then runs on the same clock ticks, so only user events need to be shared: from flying cubes and an MRI scan to a simulated world full of NPCs.

4. Croquet for real-time sync

   The Croquet protocol defines a synthetic time (“Teatime”), whose advance at each client can differ due to processor and network conditions: a client on a cellular connection, for example, will usually run slightly behind a client on a wired desktop. I extended the protocol with an NTP-like feature that enables real-time cross-client sync in applications that need it. One use of this feature was in Mediaverse, a set of apps I developed that run precisely synchronised audio and video across diverse devices and network connectivities.

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     Demo video · Watch · 2022

     Croquet Mediaverse

     Mediaverse plays video and audio in sync on almost any web-connected device. We show a click test with ten choreographed clients, then two film trailers - one with a single video backed by multiple audio devices, the other with seven devices playing both video and audio.

5. Croquet for multiuser collaboration

   We created Croquet-based tools for collaboration in both 2D and 3D spaces. Greenlight lets you set up shared meeting rooms for live or asynchronous sharing: fill a room with interactive document viewers, text or graphical editors, or general Croquet-driven apps, and everyone sees the same state. Microverse offers the same kind of sharing, but in 3D spaces; Mythos is a game-scale world built on top of Microverse.

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     Demo video · Watch · 2021

     Croquet Greenlight

     A room-based collaboration space in the browser: create a room, add documents, notes, whiteboards, web browsers. Everyone present at the time, or entering later, sees the same tools and their contents.

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     Demo video · Watch · 2023

     Croquet Microverse tour

     A tour of Microverse: a shared 3D world - here being explored by just two users - with synchronised cards, a live data feed, a demonstration of inter-world portals, and a replicated physics simulation.

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     Demo video · Watch · 2022

     Croquet Mythos

     A first-person world built on Croquet Microverse, here showing two out of the three users in the world. Thousands of NPCs react to the user avatars and to a galloping horse. As usual in Croquet, synchronising the NPCs requires zero extra network traffic; each client simulates their behaviours identically.

6. Croquet for console-quality games

   The resources available for rendering web-based games have generally fallen short of those of native game platforms. We built a bridge to allow a Croquet-synchronised JavaScript game to use Unity's full rendering capabilities, for delivery on phones, desktops and the web.

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     Demo video · Watch · 2023

     Croquet for Unity

     We built a Unity package that bridges Croquet-synchronised JavaScript game logic to the full rendering power of Unity, giving multiplayer game apps for iOS, Android, macOS and Windows, and in the browser through WebGL.