One way to think of the Croquet environment is as a high bandwidth conference phone call. Once a connection is made, the user not only has voice communication with the other participants, he also has the ability to exchange documents, collaboratively design systems, perform complex simulations, develop complex project plans, and manage complex projects.

Croquet is a computer software architecture built from the ground up with a focus on deep collaboration between teams of users.

Croquet is a computer software architecture built from the ground up with a focus on deep collaboration between teams of users. It is a totally open, totally free, highly portable extension to the Squeak programming system. Croquet is a complete development and delivery platform for doing real collaborative work. There is no distinction between the user environment and the development environment. Croquet is focused on interactions inside of a 3D shared space that is used for context based collaboration, where each user can see all of the others and what their current focus is. This allows for an extremely compelling shared experience. A new collaboration architecture/protocol called TeaTime has been developed to enable this functionality. The rendering architecture is built on top of OpenGL.

Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. Suppose it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference materials, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change.

Squeak is a 21st century dynamic-object wide-spectrum operating and authoring environment derived from the 1970s Xerox PARC Smalltalk [4] system in which overlapping window GUIs, Desk Top Publishing, media authoring, and many other familiar software systems were first developed. Several of the authors of Squeak were principals at Xerox and were co-creators of many of the PARC inventions.

Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. To achieve practical performance, a translator produces an equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to commercial Smalltalks.