Croquet Project

The technology is designed to facilitate such replication between peers, to greatly reduce the overhead needed for widespread deployment of collaborative virtual worlds.

Croquet's time-based synchronization abilities enable real-time, identical interactions between groups of users while dramatically reducing the need for server infrastructures to support virtual world deployment.

Key elements of the TeaTime synchronization architecture include: The original authors of Croquet opened a commercial company named Qwaq which was later renamed to Teleplace.

The present identity of the project has its origins in a conversation between Smith and Kay in 1990, where both expressed their frustration with the state of operating systems at the time.

Also in 1994, Mark McCahill's team at the University of Minnesota developed GopherVR, a 3D user interface to Internet Gopher to explore how spatial metaphors could be used to organize information and create social spaces.

Also in 1999, Lombardi began working with Smith on prototype implementations of highly extensible collaborative online environments based on OpenSpace.

Smith and Kay officially started the Croquet Project in late 2001, and were immediately joined by David Reed and Andreas Raab.

Reed brought to the project his longstanding work on massively scalable peer-to-peer messaging architectures in a form deriving from his doctoral dissertation that was published in 1978.

Since then, the Croquet technology infrastructure has been successfully used by private industry to build and to deploy commercial-grade closed source collaborative applications.