A Review of Open Cobalt
Open Cobalt is an open source 3D environment for real-time collaboration. The technological roots of Open Cobalt[1] can be traced back to the Croquet Project started by Alan Kay and David A. Smith in late 2001(Figure 5). The core infrastructure of Open Cobalt was advanced under the financial support from Hewlett-Packard, Viewpoints Research Institute Inc., The University of Wisconsin, The University of Minnesota, The Japanese National Institute of Communication Technology, Duke University, and several private individuals. Soon after, a university-led effort was initiated to use the Croquet to build Open Cobalt as a free application for accessing and sharing richly provisioned and hyperlinked virtual workspaces in support of research and education.
Figure 5. History of Open Cobalt
Open Cobalt shares similarities with other 3D virtual environments such as Second Life. It allows its users to enter 3D worlds as avatars and interact with the worlds and other avatars. Different from other 3D virtual environments, Open Cobalt uses the peer-to-peer technology instead of servers. From the Open Cobalt website, peer-to-peer technology allows its users to access Open Cobalt virtual worlds on local area networks, intranets, or even across the Internet without any need to access anyone else’s servers. Anyone can host an Open Cobalt virtual world from all over the Internet and for free. Open Cobalt‘s ability to leverage peer-to-peer technology as a way of supporting interactions within virtual worlds is a major point of difference from commercial multi-user virtual world systems such as Second Life where all in-world interactions are managed by central servers. Hence, users can set up virtual spaces and interact with others of their choosing with no hosting fees, licensing or virtual land lease costs.
Like Open Wonderland, Open Cobalt lacks content creation tools in-world. But it does provide the infrastructure for world creation, navigation and collaboration and most important, it supports content created in free or open source authoring applications such as Sketchup or Blender. One distinct advantage of Open Cobalt is the motion simulation. Motion Simulation written in Smalltalk through using FreeCAD application can be easily imported in Open Cobalt virtual worlds. According to the FreeCAD website, the technology itself is currently under development and when completed, will allow users to create 3D solids and simulate them in a collaborative environment. Motion Simulation is based on FreeCAD and runs inside Open Cobalt.