3D Web Browser Draws Lukewarm Review

GreyGoo writes "The media release claims 'Internet surfers will be able to walk through their favourite websites as if they are characters in a computer game with the launch of the world's first 3D browser in Australia today.' However a review from someone who has actually tested the software raises important questions about the worth of the product considering the competing social and 3D products, and that sites have to be hand-crafted in order to truly support the new browser." A browser tied to a social networking scheme seems like a recipe for supreme annoyance.

Comments

My 3d browser

[gnick]

I already have a 3d browser:
1) Vertical
2) Horizontal
3) Tabbed

Re:My 3d browser

[melikamp]

Your 3-rd dimension is discrete. The push is for a continuous dimension.

How is this a first?

[TiggertheMad]

VRML enabled sites have been around for years. It might be a more complex impimentation of a VRML plugin, but it hardly seems noteworthy.

Re:How is this a first?

[paganizer]

....and i just remembered (actually, I cheated and looked on one of my very earliest burnt CD's).
Pueblo / Chaco.
and they are still around: http://pueblo.sourceforge.net/

Re:How is this a first?

[Zadaz]

I worked on no less than three different "first" 3D web browser projects. Since I haven't done that kind of work since 2001, I can only imagine how many other have happened between now and then. (Google says about 2 million.)

It was pointless and awkward then, and they are now. Navigating a column of data is infinitely more easy than navigating a cloud of it. It's a paradigm we're used to. It's why there are (used to be) card catalogs in a library-because navigating a cloud of books is hard, but a column of titles is easy. Most web usability is bad enough in 2d, lets not give ourselves a 3rd dimension until we've earned it.

An aside: Every one of those 3D web projects I worked on back then also called themselves "Web 2.0"

What's the point?

[77Punker]

I don't know what books or newspapers would gain from being in 3D, aside from children's books. My web browsing is really not very different from how I interact with printed media, except for things like posting comments. What would a browser gain?

I've never understood the drive for a 3D GUI on a computer. I have yet to see anything more usable than the current WIMP setups included with today's major operating systems.

Re:What's the point?

[eggnoglatte]

The people who think this should read some books on user interfaces. This kind of 3D UI has been analyzed for decades, and has uniformly been found to suck for a number of reasons, including:

- while the world s 3D, the display technology itself is 2D. Introducing 3D content in 2D automatically means some information will be occluded and needs to be found through navigation.

- humans suck at 3D navigation. While we live in a 3D world, we have evolved to move on a 2D surface. Studies have shown over and over again that people cannot solve even the most basic true 3D navigation tasks without substantial training.

- 3D is a really poor use of your "screen realestate" (i.e. the number of pixels you have on your screen). In 2D, almost all of your pixels can be used to show important content, in 3D you are bound to have lots of your pixels (often way over 50%) show 3D context that does not contribute to communicating the content itself.

Adobe Atmosphere

[jbezorg]

Been there, done that. Got version 1.0 signed by the developers and it was fun while it lasted. http://www.adobe.com/products/atmosphere/

How much do you want to bet...

[imyy4u3]

That the first website to support this technology will be a porn site? It will be finished in 3...2...1...

Re:How much do you want to bet...

[hairyfeet]

Oh,that actually wouldn't be that bad. Now on the other hand,can you imagine a 3D tubgirl? Or a 3D Goatse that was rigged with a zoom that sucked your face into where you would never want your face to ever go? Now THAT would be bad. And I don't even want to think about the possibility of a 3D 2 girls 1 cup(shudders).

What's the point?

[halcyon1234]

I've always wondered-- what's the point of aiming for the 3D "social" browser anymore? It was tried, tested and failed in the late 90s / early 2000s. I remember trying out several in-browser (read: Flash or Java) 3D avatar-based chat sites. They were all universally crappy, but that seems to be a limitation of the technology. Or rather, it seems to be a limitation of attempting to use the incorrect technology when perfectly good ones already exist.

There exists, right now, several extremely successful 3D social environments that create virtual worlds for people to meet and greet in. Take WoW, for example. The interface is (compared to a kludgy browser interface) extremely easy to use. The chat features are fairly extensive. The world is massive, somewhat customizable, and very scenic. Oh, and there's a game to go with it, too. On the other side of the same coin, SecondLife has a large "social chat" following. The graphics aren't exactly WoW-level, but they meet or exceed any expectations one would have had of a browser-3D world. It is also far more customizable that WoW.

I'm certain anyone here on /. can (and most likely will) point out other 3D games / social experiments that also foot the bill

I think that what these interfaces have over the browser is that they are natural 3D. Their interfaces always were and always will be designed around 3D technology-- while a brower's main design is displaying marked-up data in a two dimensional, fairly linear (and asynchronous) manner. You can argue that you can easily put a 3D widget in there to interpret that markup language, and display it in a plug-in... but all what you've done is wrapped the problem in several layers when it didn't need to be. The plug-in can function much better outside the browser than in, and you don't have to wrap the client-server communications inside HTML or XML or whatever else you chose to send through the browser.

No Mac version is planned

[Yvan256]

I was told no Mac version is planned, but may come into the picture if there's enough of a demand.

There won't be any demand, even from Windows users.

Let's make slow sites which work almost nowhere!

[Joce640k]

Nobody likes 3D more than me ... but I think somebody doesn't understand the web too well.

Anything which:

a) Makes pages slow to load
b) Needs special plugins and graphics driver
c) Makes web pages really hard to make
d) Doesn't bring more useful info to the user ...is doomed to fail.

This thing ticks all four boxes.

3D web sites have been tried dozens of times before but how many 3D web sites do you know of? None.

3D Browsers

[db32]

Why is it that every time someone makes a 3D browser they insist it is the worlds first 3D browser? Maybe there are some trivial changes, but they have been out for ages. I remember ViOS or something like that from almost 10 years ago. It was supposed to be this revolutionary 3D internet/browser thing.