Finally, let’s look at the *Microverse IDE* page 
, from which developers can create 3D experiences.
YOUTUBE CvvuAbjh11U Croquet Microverse™ IDE - Create Your World
There’s a new vocabulary to learn in order to program in Croquet’s IDE. Objects in this virtual world are called “cards” (inspired by the famous 1980s and 90s Apple Macintosh program, HyperCard), which “can be constructed by simply dropping an SVG or 3D model into the world.” Interaction with cards is defined by “behaviors,” while “connectors” enable cards “to access external data streams.”
“Bill Atkinson’s model of computing and how things should work was hugely influential,” said Smith, referring to HyperCard’s creator. “Alan Kay was his main champion at Apple. We saw that [model] as like, that’s the right way to think about creating and constructing virtual worlds. So that’s why we call it a card. We’re gonna change the name, probably.”
DOT FROM lambda-browsing
Later in the demo, Smith showed me a 3D display of Bitcoin prices. This object was made up of three cards, he informed me: a card connecting to a feed of real-time Bitcoin prices, a bar graph card, and a card showing the Bitcoin logo.
Example of financial data displayed inside Croquet.
“The idea of HyperCard is that you can plug these things together, and that’s what’s going on with this,” Smith said. “What’s nice about all that is you don’t have to explicitly connect these things. All you do is say: this is a parent of that card, and then you use a publish-subscribe model so that they [the parent] can listen to what’s going on. So creating these applications is extremely easy and fast.”
Under the hood, Croquet’s frontend uses web sockets, REST interfaces, Three.js (a 3D JavaScript library), and WebGL (a JavaScript API for rendering 3D graphics). WebGPU is on the horizon, too. The 3D physics is done with the Rapier Physics Engine, an open source Rust-based engine running in WebAssembly that Croquet has supported since its inception. Other technologies used include Crypto.js (a collection of cryptographic algorithms implemented in JavaScript), end-to-end encryption via AES-CBC with HMAC-SHA, and Resonance Audio for spatial sound.
“The real idea of the system is it should be always be live and always collaborative, not just in the deployment but even the development side,” said Smith. “So you and I can do pair programming, for example.” He gave an example of me dropping in a new 3D object and then he would do the scripting for it.
Example of coding inside Croquet. Pink flamingo optional.
# An Open, Collaborative 3D World? Sign Me Up! Croquet is a complicated platform, and the demo wasn’t without technical glitches. But Richard MacManus very much admires that this is a web-based system. The company’s ambition is to make Croquet an open “microverses” alternative to the likes of Meta and its dream of a single, much larger (and likely proprietary) metaverse. I also like the interactive nature of the Croquet platform, that developers can use it to collaborate with other developers inside the virtual world. That vision not only aligns with Alan Kay and the Xerox PARC crew of the early 1970s, but their predecessors at SRI, led by Douglas Engelbart (who was mentioned in Croquet’s origin story as an inspiration). The World Wide Web itself has come closest to achieving Engelbart’s original vision, and perhaps Croquet will help adapt the web to the emerging 3D world. Lead image via Shutterstock; other images via Croquet.