Reflectors

Croquet has had a long back-history. According to David A. Smith, he first began developing the idea when he met Alan Kay, the personal computing pioneer who worked at ​​Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. Smith met him in the early 90s, when Kay was a senior fellow at Apple.

DOT FROM lambda-browsing

“He and I started thinking about what [are] the next steps in computing,” Smith said. “I had obviously done a lot with 3D, but it was pretty clear to both of us: it was not just 3D, but had to be collaborative 3D, interactive 3D.”

In the origin story page of its website, Croquet OS states that 1994 was the year Smith created “the first prototype of what will later become Croquet,” describing it as “the first 3D collaboration space, demonstrating live shared video and smart collaborative objects.” Kay came back into the picture in 2001, when Smith, Kay and two others (David Reed and Andreas Raab) formed “the Open Croquet Project,” which aimed to “create the first replicated computation platform.”

Replicated Computation is a key part of the current Croquet system and it achieves this via software it calls “reflectors.” In its documentation, Croquet describes these reflectors as “stateless, public message-passing services located in the cloud.” They are hosted on edge or 5G networks.

“We have deployed around the world, on four continents, what we call a reflector network,” explained Payne. “And what that is, is basically a whole bunch of small micro-servers that coordinate and synchronize the activities of everyone who’s participating in a session.”

Croquet system diagram.

In our demo, Payne and Smith were located in the United States, while Richard MacManus was in the United Kingdom (about 150 miles from London). The nearest reflector to him was in London, so that was how his participation in the Croquet virtual world was coordinated. But it’s not just users on different continents that benefit from the reflector network, it also means a single user can participate with multiple devices.

> In the demo, I was asked to open the virtual world on my phone as well as my computer (this was a little confusing, as I had two separate views — yet I was a single user).

Smith described this as “a shared simulation system.” When a user interacts with it, he said, “that message gets sent to the reflector and bounces off the reflector to all the other participants. So when you’re interacting with it on your PC, that message is also going to wind up on your phone.”

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codefrau 🦩 — discord currently we only offer On-Premises Reflectors to enterprise customers