Tea-Time museum: Croquet as a browsing and searching environment for digital libraries

In this paper, we describe a research project in the planning stage, called a Tea-Time Museum, that aims at exploration of a new environment for content browsing and multi-user collaboration based on contents. Tea (currently, Croquet) is a next generation collaborative 3D user environment proposed by Reed et al. (2002). Although Croquet is implemented as a collaborative 3D environment for users, new constructs, such as the notion of portals are considered to be key technologies for constructing the next generation digital libraries. We provide our interpretations of Croquet constructs from the view point of hypermedia processing, which will be useful for using Croquet as a basis for constructing a new method of content browsing/searching and a new collaborative (social) search based on Web content.