Julian Lombardi from the Office of Information Technology at Duke University will be lecturing on and presenting Croquet, a new operating system and user interface supporting deep collaboration.
Croquet (http://www.opencroquet.org) is an integrated 2D and 3D interface that allows for co-creativity, knowledge sharing, and deep social presence among large numbers of people. Croquet poses the question, "What if we could go back twenty years and re-work the user interface to match the technology that we have today?" Technologies have advanced rapidly since then and yet our user interfaces are still based on the metaphor of the desktop and the page. They are nothing more than document viewers--documents that are shuffled around on a desktop. Croquet proposes a collaborative environment that uses the classroom and the laboratory and the campus as metaphors instead.