Oh no another attempt at 3D web

When I saw an article about Exit Reality planning to make 3D web pages I had flashbacks of some of my first experiences of the web when an £1500 286 computer would crawl along trying to move through a virtual room in netscape navigator. It made web browsing slow and overly complicated. Now it seems that it is being tried again.

Exit Reality’s ambisious goal of making the whole web 3D seemed unlikely but after viewing their video demo it seems they may have pulled it off. Rather than having to use a new web browser/app and being limited to the dozen sites they may have invested time in supporting this feature Exit Reality have managed to render any page in a 3D environment as long as you install a browser plugin. Some sites have more 3D features than others. Exit Reality seem to have focused on social networking sites where the likes of Facebook, Flickr and YouTube all have full 3D environments designed to make the experience even better. Flickr is now a 3D gallery, YouTube a cinema and Facebook/MySpace have your videos on a TV screen and your photos in a frame and wall mounted. If you have a Facebook/MySpace account you can customise the 3D environment for your page adding in furniture and toys of your choice.

This is all well and good and may appeal to the second life generation. However, what interested me is that they are making web browsing a shared experience. You can now not just send a link to a friend for a youTube video you had a laugh at - you can invite them to join you in your own private 3D cinema and watch it together in real time. You can chat an emote while both viewing the same video. This also means I could potentially showcase my portfolio to a potential client in a 3D demo or even show them their own site after work is complete.

Realistically for it to become a useful shared web experience tool it would require widespread adoption of the plugin to the extent of Flash. In most cases speed of browsing will mean that I will want my pages to be viewed in 2D but there is definitely an appeal in viewing your Flickr photos in a gallery or sharing a web page or video with a friend.

Technical issues have made it difficult for me to say how easy/good the actual experience is. Firefox 3 renders the 3D environment but there is no control panel or way to login to either Exit Reality or the websites I visit in 3D. In IE I get the control panel but I am unable to see the 3D environment. I have only tested on my tired old office PC so will take another look on my laptop when I get a free moment.

3D web, exit reality, web browsing, plugin