Cobalt is an emerging open source and multi-platform metaverse browser and toolkit application 

being built using the open source Croquet SDK. 

This pre-alpha version of the Cobalt application is 

• being made freely available to the emerging virtual worlds community 
• under the Croquet license 
• a way of fostering a viable community-based software development effort 
• leading to open virtual world technologies 
• supporting the needs of education and research

The idea behind releasing this technology is 

• to tap into the creative potential of the broader community 
• as a way of advancing something that all of us can use to create 
• deeply collaborative
• greatly featured
• widely interlinked virtual environments 
• on a very large scale

If we all work to contribute a part of this effort we can

• make possible deep and powerful capabilities in the full release
• identifying areas of functionality to address
• 'hooking up' those functionalities 
• identify additional functionalities that can further enhance Cobalt
• help to add functionality where needed

Croquet is an open source software development environment for 

• creating and deploying deeply collaborative, multi-user online applications 
• multiple operating systems and devices 

Derived from Squeak, it features

• peer-based network architecture
• communication
• collaboration
• resource sharing
• synchronous computation between multiple users on multiple devices
• multi-user 2D and 3D applications and simulations
• making possible the distributed deployment of very large scale
• richly featured
• interlinked virtual environments
• real-time
• identical interactions between groups of users

The architecture of Croquet actually makes it quite easy to develop collaborative applications without having to spend a lot of effort and expertise in understanding how replicated applications work. There are a number of simple patterns and rules to remember, but otherwise, it is quite simple to quickly develop very powerful systems. 

Click here for more detailed information on the technology.

The public facing home page is at http://croquetconsortium.org/index.php/Cobalt 

• Google Groups
• http://groups.google.com/group/cobaltcroquet/ 
• Duke resources
• http://croquet-src-01.oit.duke.edu/cobalt.html
• Project page at the Consortium
• http://croquetconsortium.org/index.php/Cobalt 
• Monticello Code Database
• http://croquet-src-01.oit.duke.edu:8886/
• Mantis Bug DB
• http://croquet-src-01.oit.duke.edu/mantis/index.php 
• Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel(s)
• The squeak irc portal has info on how to access the irc network: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/IRCPortal 
• just substitute #squeak with #croquet and the instructions still apply