Slashdot Mirror
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.
...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!
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
It wants its VRML back.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.