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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.
I already have a 3d browser:
1) Vertical
2) Horizontal
3) Tabbed
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I know this.
VRML enabled sites have been around for years. It might be a more complex impimentation of a VRML plugin, but it hardly seems noteworthy.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
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.
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/
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
...must developers continue to inflict us with the 3D interface meme? Time and time again these "wouldn't it be cool if..." ideas turn out to be entirely crappy.
Who wants hand gestures instead of a mouse? Someone who uses a computer for 10 seconds at a time on a conference stage.
Who wants to have to wander around a rendered landscape to visit only the sites some software has chosen for them? My grandparents. No, wait, not even them.
People need to quit wasting cash developing crappy ideas, and spend some time generating GOOD ideas to develop.
Rock is dead. Long live scissors and paper!
And yes, My internets have 4 dimensional properties! :D
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
Look forward to pop-ups!
That the first website to support this technology will be a porn site? It will be finished in 3...2...1...
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.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
...for a browser that renders genuine 3d solid objects, so I can code all my sites to literally slap everyone still using IE. But other than that, I don't care about "3d" on a computer.
Caveat Utilitor
There won't be any demand, even from Windows users.
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I remember back in 1995 playing with an experimental CompuServe client which turned the online service into a blocky cityscape, with the diferent forums represented by buildings, message threads represented by branching trees, and so on. It was fairly impressive for back then, and if I recall correctly it was VRML-based.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
It wants its VRML back.
Heh. Funny how your sig works with that post.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
IDSPISPOPD
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
Stuff like Snoswell's cyberterm environment were much cooler the first time around. This is just the same old "tack a 3d setting on to fundamentally 2d data for no good reason" like html-to-vrml browsers. You want social browsing, add a freaking IRC client to your browser that autojoins rooms named after the url.
Either break entirely and do something new that requires 3d to interact with data that can not be properly represented in 2d, or integrate the third dimension in a non-obtrusive yet useful manner. Photos(currently a 2d medium) and the photosynth point cloud(3d) is decent example of the latter. If I could think of a good example of the former, I'd make it:)
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 ...is doomed to fail.
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
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.
No sig today...
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.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
It's a 3d chat system that opens web pages in Internet Explorer when you click on the doors of buildings with names like "Fox News". And it's not even really a 3d chat system. The chat is a conventional-looking instant messenger window in the corner of the screen (in a separate top level window) and doesn't seem to have any relationship to where you are in the 3d view... which is probably a good thing: while I was in there I saw precisely one other person, until they started to move, whereupon they disappeared.
No user created content, or any hint of user-created content.
They were hinting that they were willing to pay for playtesters while I was testing it.
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Really, this is all Second Life is. A 3D World Wide Web. Realms are handled by different servers. You can go to Dell or PG and see 3D models of their products. When I want to chat with tech support, I *could* go to the Dell store and do a voice chat with the Dell support guy (If they had support manning their page.) The voice chat in Second Life is pretty neat.
There are plenty of people who have products for sell in Second life. They are displayed in 2D on walls in some places, but most have the actual product sitting there on the floor which you can try before you buy.
In the past, there has been a 3D weather room where you could watch the radar in 3D. That's down last I checked.
RADAR is something that would truly shine in 3D. Not only see an X/Y view of where the jet is, but also Z with Z being altitude. If we had a 3D display too that would even be better.
I think this is something that once you start using it, like dual monitors, you really see why it's so much better. You'll find easier ways to do your work. Especially if I have better than 1024x768 graphics. If I could scroll certain windows into my systems into the background with high resolution, I could keep them in my peripheral and switch to them when I see something alerting.
Well. I had to check it out. I got bored pretty quick. It seemed like it was a memory muncher. For people used to playing games, the graphics are going to be very disappointing. Also, I like to browse at light speed. The faster the better. This is more like strolling, one spends more time getting there than being there...lol. The whole affair seemed like it took too long to load, and didn't have a lot of support(as in help) I might check it out again some other time when I'm totally bored, but for now it will sit idle.