ExitReality
ExitReality launched in open beta today and there is coverage in a few places. Virtual Worlds News has detailed coverage with lots of interview questions, while CNet has a slightly more critical article.
What does it do? It automatically grabs web content and sticks it into a 3d space. You can shape the 3d space if you want, but it does it by default — no work for the site owner. It also slurps 3d content of all sorts from basically anywhere to let you build with it. I don’t know what the scripting is like, and it (like most all the 3d solutions) is based on a plugin, and one that as of yet is still limited to Windows. But that seems like an obvious thing to want to remedy.
I haven’t tried it out yet, but it does seem like an important transitional step in some ways. It’s still the notion that people want to see websites in 3d, which I think is basically wrong, but it does it in a manner that is much more like the web than past attempts.
It will be interesting to see where this one goes.
8 Responses to “ExitReality”
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Raph!
Mac OS???
= Chimera Cosmos
P.S. Enjoyed your Metaverse U talk. You guys got me onto Facebook, and it kinda exploded. hehe
Ugh. Three (!) seperate components installed. Crashes both my browsers. MTBF: 30 seconds. The URL protocol hack is totally broken if you use two browsers.
Total hacky crap.
A solution without a problem.
The web will not become “Web 3[.]D”
Randy
Most people (those few who’s radar it actually registered on, anyways) feel this is frivolous, wasteful, and a downright turn-off.
Most fears voiced are about advertising and the hassle of navigating a 3d space to find their sought-after product rather than clicking a few familiar links.
Raph, did you say this was actually one of your early ideas about overlapping MMOs with the web – making a “3D web”? That it would procedurally generate 3D spaces based on websites’ content? What makes you now feel the exact opposite, that this isn’t the right way to go about things?
That’s right, IQPierce, but it was years ago — like 2003 — and the idea was more like that combined with PMOG. The web was the landscape, and a central server tracked avatars and objects. Sites were just zones or rooms, so to speak.
So it was much more of a game metaphor.
As to why I don’t think about it this way anymore — because I have become convinced that 3d is a terrible way to see lots of sorts of content. 🙂 It is a great way to see other sorts, but that leads me to think of a mixed-media web.
Mixed media is what it is always going to be. It’s not like we ever talked about video replacing text on the web. It is simply another medium that can be used for some things effectively just like 3D can. ExitReality certainly doesn’t claim to replace the 2d web, rather it lowers the barrier for people to enter the 3D web. I think the major difference is people are use to producing video so understand how to use it effectively. But Interactive 3D is a new medium that has a lot of unexplored depth and we have a long way to go before it becomes as well understood as video.
These days, it seems to me that we’re seeing a resurgence back to 2D mechanics.
3D was a cool hack in 1993, with the Nintendo 64 fresh released and Wolfenstein 3D wheting our whistles. These days, it’s becoming clear that 3D is merely a different – and often quite difficult – way of presenting things.
The question is no longer, “can make it 3D?” Now, it’s “is it actually a better product in 3D?”
Looking at the demo reel of this, it looks like the implementation is to present web pages as flat panels in a 3D world, or perhaps with a bit of VRML. I have a hard time saying it’s actually a better product.
Of course, a lot of us are thinking of Cyberspace from William Gibson’s Necromancer or the Matrix. I’m not sure if we’ll ever reach the point in which 3D is a better way of doing things, if only because 2D is a lot easier to grok.
That’s really not true. We don’t use stone tablets anymore. It is conceivable that Web3D can fully replace Web2D: if it does turn out that the 3D pundits are right and people do feel more natural in a 3D space than a 2D one, in large enough amounts and with sufficient utility, yadda yadda.
But I personally don’t think so. At the very least, I’m pretty sure I won’t live to see it, so I’m not really burning up navel-gazing hours on the subject.