Extending Croquet Spaces with Vector Fields, Vehicles, and Virtual Presence

The Croquet system is a toolkit for constructing collaborative multi-user virtual environments incorporating time-synchronization and advanced 3D visualization and simulations. To investigate how a Croquet environment might be used in education to explore physical phenomenon, we are developing metaphors for visualizing and making audible space-varying forces (vector fields). These vector fields can interact with objects, and this allows us to construct simulations of systems such as charged particles in fields or sailboats interacting with wind. A natural extension of the vector field/object interaction is to allow for objects that act as vehicles so that users may ride them. By providing a vehicle capability to objects, we have both an intuitive metaphor for changing the user´s spatial navigational interfaces, and allow users to experience the path of an object through a field. This vehicle metaphor also points toward an interface for guided tours of spaces. Guided tours imply voice and text chat to enable user discussion and collaboration. Not everyone is present in a given Croquet space at all times - this motivates our work to provide bridges between the Croquet in-world experience and legacy text-chat/voice communications systems. These legacy chat systems can also provide information about who is currently present and active in a given Croquet space to those outside the space and so help address user-rendezvous problems. While chat is important, if Croquet is seen as nothing more than chat in the form of a 3D avatar fancy-dress party, we will not achieve our goals of transforming educational content via multi-user simulations and advanced visualization. It is the synergies inherent in combining virtual presence, vehicles, vector fields that allows for rich collaborative construction and exploration of spaces and physical simulations (such as charged particles in fields or sailboats) with user-led guided tours of these spaces