WebPrims - The Internet on a Wooden Cube

Enabling web access in SL would open up a zillion extremely creative possibilities, most of which you've already covered, Tiger.

Because I am both a pessimist and a visual artist, I can see a potential for copyright-abuse by direct-linking to images (like the first example in your list, Tiger). The potential for IP violation is higher with direct-linking than with SL's current server-side texture model. A server-side texture can be removed, but can an external link be selectively blocked from within SL?

I sure would be pissed if somebody plastered their SL T-shirt with one of my online images. And sold it. Some sort of substantial reporting/follow-up mechanism for IP violations would be needed. Luckily, I can block direct-linking because I have admin access to the server where my work is hosted. Not every artist with a web site has the means or ability to do block direct-linking.

I'd be willing to take the negative in stride, because there are too many cool possibilities with a web-enabled SL.

I imagine it'd be treated like any other DMCA case, the perp would be handled appropriatley.

Its the same case as image uploading, the only way to take action is after its done and someones spotted it really.

You can do the same thing with alot of websites as well, taking images from other peoples pages, putting them on your own, etc.

I don't think it'd be *too* much of an issue. Especialy since the owners of the webserver can usualy see whats going on and could potentialy report it faster to LL than some other inworld content.

Yah never know though.

Edit: oh and Tiger I must say, nice graphic and presentation to these ideas.

Heh. If it was handled like an extreme DCMA case, Second Life would be shut down because it facilitates copyright infringement
It's not just copyright issues at hand here--there are also bandwidth costs related to file leeching.

Yup. The difference with direct linking on a web page is that (in my case anyway) I can check my server logs and find out where exactly the image was used, and how many times it was requested. I doubt a SL direct-link would show which resident requested the file--but if it did, that would be a step in the right direction for those artists who have access to their server logs.

I don't think it will be a huge disaster either, but there are some key differences between internal and external files that make direct-linking more annoying and potentially more costly for artists. Currently, someone can steal a 200k image and upload it to the SL servers. The bandwidth cost to the artist there is minimal. Let's now imagine that in a web-enabled SL, someone creates an object with a direct-linked 200k texture. Let's say the object is very popular. The artist's site then gets hit once every time someone first looks at the texture, and then conceivably once again every time the user's local cache is cleared. Bandwidth cost is a real and measurable "damage" against an artist, unlike the current SL system where the real-world cost of image theft is difficult, if not impossible to calculate.

gee brad. i thought i was the only person that believed this. it's nice to know that there are two of us. i agree with your assessment, fun and all.

on topic, i think ll shouldn't concentrate on providing a web access feature to inworld prims. i think they should give us an api so we can tell our client to open a web browsing window that "appears" to be inworld. the client could match the window to a prim face for our view just like it does everything else.

if other people wanted to see it, they could add the feature to their client via a little plugin dll or such that we provide to them. think what this would do for advertising, teaching, the list goes on and on...

*edited to add that, of course, a couple of people would develop very very good versions of this and those would become fairly standard.

Good point on the stealing bandwidth issue. But I have a suggested solution that was, in fact, a solution to the same problem in another area. If the URL is to an entire page, fine. Render it and map the resulting temporary texture to a prim. But if the URL is to a texture, then check the same path for a file, let's call it "secondlifeperms.xml", and if it's not there, don't fetch and use the image. (The client might also check several truncations of the path to look for the XML file in a higher directory.)

Several versions of the file can be hosted on SL's download page, each with a different permissions set like "anyone can use" or "no one but <avatar name>". This would let someone that is hosting some images control who can link to them from inside SL. And it would make it impossible to direct link to the unknowing's web sites and steal their bandwidth.

Not only that, but you could limit by agent, object owner, or object creator. If limited to a single agent, then only that agent can fetch that texture. If limited to an object, only objects that meet the requirements can use the texture, whereupon any agent that looks at it will stream the file.

People with a more technical bent could even use the XML/RPC system to modify the permissions on the fly.


Imagine a poker game where the avatars that sit at the table have their keys RPCed to an external server. There is one directory full of card images for each player, and the server modifies the "secondlifeperms.xml" file in each directory so only the one player can link to the images in each. The cards on the table have a default SL texture on them that looks like the back of a card. But each player sees their own cards face-up in front of them since the URL texture on their own cards works for them (and them alone). As the game progresses, the cards change their URL texture links to become different cards, but always from the directory that player has access to so only that players sees the change. A non-player would just see the default SL texture of card backs sine they wouldn't have access to any of the card image directories.


The whole idea of putting the web on a prim is an easy one, if you have a HTML render engine handy. Instead of taking a rendered web page image and painting it onto a window, you just send it to the video card as a texture. It's just like taking a screen shot of a web page and uploading it to SL as a texture, except you skip the upload and it's all automatic. The issue of making it INTERACTIVE is a different story. In my initial examples, I sort of assumed that would be the case, but it may not. You may only be able to SEE a page, and any interactivness would have to be through RPC calls. (At least at first…)

I have 2 requests...

1. When you make Web On A Prim, also make a web-based SL client. That way I could play SL in my browser...and in SL, play SL, in a browser, and in THAT browser... play SL...oof I got a headache.

2. Make pop-up ads rez new browser prims. Just because.

-aimee

sigh

Tiger the direct-linking solution is excellent, thanks for suggesting it. I think that in addressing bandwidth theft and IP issues that you've covered all of the admin/moderation/policing issues.

Browser based SL? @_o

I think we have enough technical issues as it is, thank ye very much

That's the second "sigh" I've seen you post today, Catherine. I might have missed some. Not having a good Monday? Or do you see a problem in the future of internet data being incorporated inside the SL environment?

not if you like reality shoved down your throat. www.3d just like i said months ago. now what did the lindens say? "nooo that wont happen" I'm having a bad few weeks here everytime I read anything in the forums its always about the all mighty dollar. I'm sick of hearing it. Times have changed and I hate the changes. I'm not going down without a fight. At the very least ppl will know this customer is dissatisfied.

A similar thing was done a couple years back, not in SL of course, with a browser called the Cubic Eye. It rendered a separate URL on each face, could be freely rotated and zoomed in and out, and could populate the cube with the top 6 search results from a search engine. It never went very far though - don't think it lasted a year.

Gee, I dunno am I the only one who isn't super excited about the web inside SL? Maybe I'm just a pessimist but I can just imagine all the malls replaced with 20 tall stacks of 10x10 prims with giant MyEbay stores on their sides. Oh and going to a new place and waiting for all the textures to appear only to have each of them turn into "404 sorry your webpage was not found"...

I dunno why I'm so cranky this morning but this just sounds unpleasant! I thought SL was supposed to replace the web not turn into it...

Aweee but I WANT my endless recursive SL experience

Web on a prim?
But where will cookies live?
What of passwords?
What of secure sites?

SLSSL? I'm scared now!
And what of mistyped URLs and pr0n popup prims in the Welcome Area???

The "almighty dollar" is an abstraction used to represent value. I think Second Life is pretty valuable, myself.

I've seen a few concerns pop up, let me see if I can find a way to cover them...


- A world covered in 404 errors...

I imagine the URL texture feature to be overlaid on the existing SL texture system so that both exist at once. This means that a prim would have a normal texture key on it AND and URL (the URL being optional, of course) so that, if the URL isn't valid, the default SL texture is shown. Maybe with a "broken link" icon slapped over it, though that might only be visible to the object's owner. (So they know it's broken.) So the default texture would repalce 404 errors or cases where the client doesn't have permission to display that page.


- People painting the wall of their house/shop with their "My eBay" page...

Well, if clicking on the elements and links of displayed web pages didn't do anything, this would be of limited use. Little more than a badly constructed billboard. A custom texture would get more business.

But if the pages ARE fully functional (and you can click links wrapped around a torus)... Well, I mentioned a possible requirement to have a special "secondlifeperms.xml" file in the same directory as any texture you want to remotely link to. What if the same requirement was extended to web pages? If the URL on a prim doesn't have a perms XML in the same location, the prim's default SL texture would be displayed with an overlaid "WWW" icon on it. Hovering your mouse over the surface would present the (un-registered) URL so you can decide if you want to load it. If so, you click on the object and, only then, does the page load onto the prim.

This way, only player-made (or modified) web pages would always load, since those players would drop a perms XML file in with the HTML files. Any third party page like eBay or Google or Slashdot would just be the default SL texture and a web icon letting passers-by know that they can link to an external page if they like.

I also imagine that you will have to be within a set distance of a prim before its URL will load, and its defailt SL texture will be used until that time. You DON'T want to step into a sim and have your client start downloading 1,000 URL's worth of web pages all at once. Treat it like the bump map feature where you need to be close to see it.

It would be interesting. Maybe we could eventually have hooks that would allow you to access Second Life within Second Life. Then you could have your AV sit down at a computer and access SL, and have that AV sit down at a computer and access SL, and have that AV sit down at a computer and access SL, and have that AV sit down at a computer and access SL, and have that AV sit down at a computer and access SL, and have that AV sit down at a computer and access SL, and have that AV sit down .....

web links work well in Activeworlds linking textures,webpages,audio...ect..
the best is the streamming media you can play on objects. I have
over 40 anime music videos in my world in AW and it never lags.
if this is ever added to SL there should be an option in prefrences to
turn off web-linking for the URL challenged. so you can enjoy it or just avoid it
-LW
(AW user since 1996 aka:Lightwave)

Hee, ok Tiger! How about this nightmare?

You're flying through a world that's not just full of the regular billboards and for sale signs but one where EVERY SINGLE SPARE PRIM anybody has on their land is blown up to 10x10 blocks loading up an obnoxious blinking banner ad. Why would somebody litter our world with humongous billboards? Oh 'cause they're not just trying to sell their land in world, they're getting a few pennies from some web ad company every-time somebody flies by close enough to make that texture appear. Gee if you think pop-up ads are bad on the desktop imagine popup web zombie cubes, everytime they get clicked on they make more and make more traffic for the web server they point at.

And the whole concept of PG areas becomes completely impossible if a texture could change. I mean, I'm not responsible if the picture I put on a texture gets changed into a porno ad by somebody else right? Or what if I buy a shirt from somebody that I like, then suddenly one day while I'm wearing it, it changes into an ad for some other game? Or more likely it just turns into an error page 'cause the creator's not playing SL anymore?

/me runs away!

I personally would love this, and now!

I have done this quite well using (hardware rendered) vrml on my own site, at the time, my site was a 3d world, my users could access mylinks archives downloads without leaving world, this however was sorta redundent since they were in mozilla anyway.
Other really cool uses for it tho were computer emulators,... imagine roaming a metaverse (like sl) and down at a terminal and directly accessing a C-64, an Atari ST or an Celcovision Adam , now you have users that can create their own programs (demos and games), save their work on their own computer.
Then simply e-mailed me the prog for a showcase or download the java based emulators themselves and set up their own site.

without getting into all the tech if@how this is how it basicly works (with mozilla-firefox)
all 100% client side except for the download of the *.jar file <-if emulators are used
have mozilla installed... i dont know if it would work with IE or Konquer but
redirect the new mozilla window as a face on the appropiate prim.

cookies IP addies ssl email ftp and anything else you can think of was 100% being handled by the client, and this silly idea that a browser eats butloads of machine power isnt ture. i have sl running right now on my el crappy pc, cpu usage is less than 10 percent (and sl HATES running on my computer in a window)

reason I would love this, is becuase i also am sort of a gfx artist, no matter how good you make them they still look like a blurry pile of stink even when fully rezed. Also more recently I spent a day doing math and making a sprite (anim texture) for my shop's, just to have a blurry pos dogbarf that sorta looked like my sprite (yea im being harsh, you spend 14+ hours on a thing of badness for it to look like that)

Now does it really have to be a prim??
i would be happy for a touch script that brings up a dialog box with the page rendered inside (wich also would kill the 10x10 landmall hell, and create private sessions between sl users and the server)

oh and im sorry im new to second life, and pretty much everywhere i go i see walls of blinkey sound clip spitting take 10 min to load a picture mega prim malls with 10000 copies of the same script running =\

(ps) in my opinion 1 vending unit with multi ad screens (ad's for the mall contents not *!#&@^ russian housewives) and a web catalog buying interface would be more likley to catch on vs the landblock malls , if you pay for land would you rather have lets say 200 prims in your mall or in your house.

ok i posted now back to my 1050 result search becuase some tard grouped greif and discussion in with tech help and i cant find what im looking for in the adv search (heh!)

Osgeld Barmy
[email]osgeld@cheesefactory.us[/email]

Heh.. osgeld, you rock

Anyhow, you can do this with the QuickTime plugin now available in SL.

I mean, good lord, have any of you looked at the internet lately?