Open Cobalt

Open Cobalt is a free and open-source software platform for constructing, accessing, and sharing virtual worlds both on local area networks or across the Internet, with no need for centralized servers.

By using a peer-to-peer-based message passing protocol to reduce reliance on server infrastructures for support of basic in-world interactions across many participants, Open Cobalt makes it possible for people to hyperlink their virtual worlds via 3D portals to form a large distributed network of interconnected collaboration spaces.

With no licensing fees, users and developers can also freely build and share highly capable multi-user virtual workspaces, game-based learning and training environments, or even just create places to meet and interact with friends.

[1] In early 2008, and with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,[2] Julian Lombardi and Mark P. McCahill, at Duke University, launched the community-based software development effort to build Open Cobalt as an open-source virtual world browser application and construction toolkit.

In May 2008, Lombardi was awarded a National Science Foundation grant[3] to further strengthen the community-based software development effort and bring the Open Cobalt virtual world browser to its alpha release.

The goals of the Open Cobalt effort are to stimulate the use of distributed virtual environments, advance visual simulations, and deepen collaboration in education, research, and personal entertainment - and in so doing to: Open Cobalt is both an end-user application and full featured software development environment for creating a rich network of end-user created interlinked virtual worlds.

Open Cobalt's software development environment enables programmers to enjoy the capabilities of a true late bound, message sending language.

Open Cobalt's reliance on Squeak's generalized storage allocator and garbage collector makes it highly efficient in real-time and allows reshaping of objects to be done safely.

Open Cobalt user interface and avatar-enabled virtual environment containing . kmz mesh content imported from Google's 3D Warehouse . Users are able to provision content to Open Cobalt spaces that can be developed and managed using third-party tools and resources.
Open Cobalt 3D hyperlinks connecting five different virtual spaces. Three-dimensional hyperlinks appear as navigable portals and enable Open Cobalt worlds to be organized by end-users into an interlinked network of virtual spaces across local and wide area networks.
Two users' avatars accessing a single VNC session within a secure and collaborative Open Cobalt space. Integration of VNC with Open Cobalt makes it possible for users to collaboratively access the desktops and applications running on remote machines anywhere on the network.
Open Cobalt's programming environment. A complete professional programmer's language ( Smalltalk / Squeak ), IDE , and class library is present in every distributed, running participant's copy.