WebPrims - The Internet on a Wooden Cube

It has been asked for by many people. It has been decried as the death of Second Life (as has almsot every other new feature). It may be the most powerful and radical change to the SL experience... And several Lindens have mentioned it. Will this become a reality, and when? I know not. But... I got to wondering: How will it affect us? What will it add. What will it take away?

How will the Web-on-a-Prim affect Second Life?


Here are a few things I came up with...

1) llSetTextureURL( "http://www.myserverspace.com/my_image.jpg", ALL_SIDES );

-- A new option to have textures NOT be stored on Second Life's asset servers. Instead, they would be on remote servers and be updateable or "live".

2) llSetTextureURL( "http://www.google.com/search?q=second+life", 0 );

-- Full web access from inside the game.

3) llSetTextureURL( "http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=843", 0 );

-- Off-line product catalogs, the ultimate one-prim vendor.

4) llSetTextureURL( "http://www.myserverspace.com/control_panel.html", 0 );

-- Dashboards, control panels, and other user interfaces all COMPLETELY under the author's control... via html.

5) llSetTextureURL( "http://www.gamingopenmarket.com/", 0 );

-- Complete access to off-line sources, auctions, and exchange houses, without leaving SL.


Add your thoughts, but consider the unsupported "It'll RUIN SL!!!" comment made. If that is your belief, feel free to say WHY, but for the most part, let's go with the idea that it IS coming...

Can you see the ripples in that glass of water on your desk?

Ah. You laid that out really well.

It's funny that no matter how much some of us fear and/or resist change right now, in hindsight it will really seem laughable and like small fries. The very notion of a lightbulb used to terrify people too.

Very interesting concept. Just having the web in SL, not sure if it's needed. We have our own interface, and I don't think having mini user agents in the game will add much. But being able to control images as textures, with live updating? That's interesting.

Just as a note on implementation, I imagine it will all by client-side.

In other words the texture for a prim would be sent to the client as a URL, instead of as an image file. The client (newview.exe) would do the actual html-get and formatting, then send it into OpenGL to be rendered as a surface. Everyone will receive the same URL, and so see the same "texture". There may need to be some sort of refresh-rate assigned to the prim so that pages that change are actually updated in the 3D space.

Ooh... With the right server-side code, you could have displays that look different to different people. A MUST for many games and activities.

Yes!

If not for URL's soon, then at least conditionals for simple textures...?

There's another thread on the simple conditional texture idea, so please don't let my enthusiasm hijack Tiger's (always interesting) line of thought

- yoshi

Lord, that would make things so awesome.

If that's really going to happen, I can't wait!

Hmm, what if I want to see the web on a cut, physical, hollow, twisted torus?
while skydiving....
through jessie...

wouldn't matter at all in texture generation, it would just look funny

I know - although i t might make you sick if its some complex flash animation.

How about surfing the web while riding on a surfboard in real life?

http://www.intel.com/cd/corporate/pressroom/emea/eng/150308.htm

"Intel, the world’s largest chip manufacturer, has created the world’s first ever surfboard with built-in wireless laptop. The surfboard will allow surfers to check their emails, surf the web, and even record footage of themselves catching the best waves. The tablet laptop based on Intel® Centrino™ mobile technology allows a wireless Internet connection from the surfboard to a ‘hotspot’ on the beach.The Intel Wireless Technology Surfboard has been developed to accompany the 2004 Intel GoldCoast Oceanfest, the North Devon free sports and music festival held June 18th - 20th, sponsored this year by Intel."

Oh, and I support this product and/or service (web-browser-enabled prims in SL).

I want this.

...and Image Maps

This will be amazing when it happens.

I would be hesitant to encourage the Lindens to put an entire browser inside of the SL client. Think about all the processing that IE or Netscape or <pick-your-favorite-browser> has to do just to figure out how to draw that page in a window. Even if you don't have content that requires external plug-ins, there's a lot of computation that goes into drawing that page in your browser.

This doesn't even address the question of how you are going to be able to handle inputs like sliders and radio buttons, and pull-down menus, and the like, if those happen to be in the HTML that is being served up.

Now imagine the SL client doing all of this, even before it figures out how to paint that image on a prim. You think you have low FPS now?!? This would kill the client.

With that said, who knows what the future of hardware and browser technology might be. It might be kind of kewl down the road. But with what we have today, I have to say "thanks, but no thanks"

I might consider dynamic .jpgs or .wav's/.mp3's that are referenced by a URL... but not entire HTML-pages, what with all the computes that would be necessary to figure out how to draw them.

- Ace

And that could be only the beginning. If that goes well, we could be able to import other windows into SL, so that we never have to leave the world to do our texture editing, look up the answers at trivia, or check our e-mail. Of course, then your putting all of that stuff in world for people to see, so you may want to be careful about what you do, but still.

This could be something really useful!

Well, I think that's one of the main reasons why I play this game. I never ever thought of SL as being "gold" and pretty much being released. I mean, if you think about it, this game is still technically in Beta, because of all of the features they are adding, the patches, and all of the ground breaking work they are doing. And with every new feature comes brand new bugs, and sure, they're annoying, but it's fun to test them out and still use them because they are availlable. And if it becomes too much of a problem, then people won't use it, and it won't be as big of a problem anymore. Besides, it seems to me the Lindens have worked "most" of the big kinks out of alot of the features they add, and while there are bugs, things aren't as bad as most people think they will be. I think they will througoughly test this before implementing it, and will make sure that it really doesn't kill the grid. If it's a problem, they'll tell us, and say we'll implement this later when the technology is right.

I think what I'd use something like that for more than anything would be to look up the LSL wiki in world

That would rock.

No mucking around with dual screens and windows.

Siggy.

I've seen similar a few years ago in prototype, but it used a high-end SGI to run - it was a full 3-D browser.

This is cool, but we ought not to have to keep reinventing the wheel - LL needs to implement a HTML texture of some sort, or an entire seperate prim if needs be (whether permanent or temporary) - where we can do text in markup. And yes, we've been suggesting it over and over, and I've personally talked with Cory about this - I think (and Philip's town hall 2 months ago reinforces it) Linden Lab is aware of this need very muchly, but from all I can tell they seem overswamped with things to do.

If we want this, we need to demand it and LL can examine bumping this up in priority list.

OK I seem to be locked out of SL right now, so I'll reply to this thread. I'm not sure what the big deal about this is, this sorta thing is already out there in 3D universes
examples:
OuterWorlds
CyberNet Worlds
Active Worlds

You can get a look at the basic application browser on the first link. You can see a web window "built-in" on the right hand side. The other applications are pretty similar in configuration. Its toggle on/off you can have it displayed or not.

But if you have the desire to surf the web or shop the web, check your email or whatever, you can do so while you chat and build etc.

When you build in places like that, in order to put a texture on say a wall you type into the edit interface: create texture h ttp://www.my webspace.com/brickwall.jpg

So instead of like in here, where you just pick and plunk down textures, you store your stuff on an outside website and apply the url to the picture you want.

I'm thinking that the fuss might be this: that SL technology and the technology needed to bring the web into SL aint quite compatible, or might mess up the whole shebang. As for me, I don't think I mind either way, just as long as I can still do what I do in here.

OH and that article on surfin the net while you actually are umm surfing (on the ocean) pretty cool! I think...I'm not a surfer...will hafta consult with my brother on that LOL chaka brah!!

A while ago I posted a link to a Croquet screenshot showing an in-world browser like this. Since then I've learned that Croquet currently relies on Scamper, a simple and apparently lame browser running as part of the system. A Croquet developer explained that with Windows there is a problem mapping application output to an OpenGL texture because it goes to the "screen" rather than a bitmap (not a problem with X Windows). SphereXP, for instance, seems to use only screenshots of the desktop rather than live output for this reason. Anyway, if LL does put a browser "on a prim", I wonder if they'll solve that problem or make their own simple browser.

Web-on-a-prim (WOAP?) would essentially kill malls. That would make me very, very happy. For a little while, until they were all replaced by plywood cubes and clubs. Some may be indistinguishable from plywood cubes, but that is to be expected.

Seriously though, if I was a mall owner, I'd seriously put plans on hold for expanding until the implications of web-based commerce and searchable indexes were known. That goes for the telehub-choking store owners, too.

Hmm..so would this support live web-casts? Seems like some websites and resources would really hog bandwidth. But what it could do for the sex industry in SL..err..I mean education in SL!

I would imagine that any web implementation in Second Life would be without such bells and whistles as Flash animations or other plug-ins. They may not even support forms, though that would be easier to include. Web cams that use a regular image and a meta=refresh tag would work, though.

Another implementation issue would be scale. Right now we set the UV coordinates of textures based on a percentage of their actual size. Web pages have no actual size, but reformat to what is available. There would have to be a default scale a page is displayed at (say, one meter = 640 pixels) and you can scale that up or down as a percentage. So you could make a wall that's 10 meters to a side with a scale of 1.0 and the page would be rendered on it as if it were a window 6400 pixels wide. Or you could set the scale to 10.0 and have the page blown up to fill the whole surface. A single meter wide prim could look like the first wall by setting it's scale to 0.1 though that would be a difficult page to read.

Modern browsers suffer from bloat due to all the extras that are added on. This would be a very fast and simple HTML parser, I would imagine.

I would hope the meta data sent with the HTML request includes object key, viewer name/key, etc...


(A poster on the wall of an avatar's living room might point to their blog URL...)

Internet _on_ a prim I don't see happening. What would be cool, however, is a browser within SL.

Touching a prim could bring up a browser window to your website. And in your website you could have special links that interact directly with SL (purchasing, customizing, etc).

There was another virtual world that also had a browser on objects, I believe it was a browser based on Mozilla or some such. I've lost the link, it was an open source virtual world if anyone can find it, they had a screenshot of the browser.

I believe a browser on a prim is not only possible, but will happen eventualy, and will be very usefull and cool to have.

I'd love to have a workable laptop in SL, that not only allowed me to browse the web, pull images from the web (Which is a much less technological thing to do than a webbrowser on a prim), AND allowed me to launch other applications and browse my own computer (much more difficult than a webbrowser).

Allowing for programs-within-programs.

My predicition:

- First we'll have Text-ures on a prim, i.e. something simular to XyText, but built in (which ActiveWorlds has built in already as well).

- Then we'll have the ability to pull images directly onto a prim from a link, simular to ActiveWorlds technology.

- Then maybe video on a prim (something AW also has, but requires WindowsMediaplayer to be installed :\) or webbrowser on a prim (croquet and the other one).

- Then at some point in a very distant future, browse your computer and launch applications on a prim.

Oh, and all of these would be streaming, i.e. everyone would see you doing them around you, so you can browse the web together, or someone could watch you play a game on a prim from your computer.