Filed under: News and developments by Digado

After Croquet and Open Sim Linden Labs introduces ‘HTML-on-a-Prim’. You can now see 2D websites from within the virtual world Second Life. This has been a popular request from the community for a while now, and today Linden Lab released their new, test client with the ability to import images of websites on 3D objects. Though still in a very early stage, I think its a really exciting feature, and once developed will be a valuable addition to the Second Life platform.

The current stage of ‘HTML-on-a-Prim’ is pretty simple. The moment the website gets loaded, Second Life creates a static picture (not a snapshot, you can see the elements get loaded, and scrollbar are all present). However, this means it still lacks shared experience or interaction with the web page itself - flash is still disabled as it uses the Mozilla browser which apparently currently doesn’t support the flash format. Another disadvantage is it needs the ’streaming media’ channel, the channels also used for 1 video channel per land. This means you can stream and display just 1 website, or video into Second Life per parcel at a time, and the user needs to enable the video to actually see anything. (Picture: Me standing in front of ‘Twitter-on-a-Prim’)

On the upside, the website displayed scales really well in the 3d environment. The text displayed is readable without any difficulty and actually allows quite a bit of zooming/scaling. I’m curious to see what Linden Lab will develop in the next few months, and whether we will see multiple display channels, flash/video support, shared experience browsing or the one they’ve been hinting at so far, the interactivity of the website implemented before the ‘may 2008′ Philip promised about a month ago. (picture: zoomed in HTML-on-a-Prim of the BBC website)

Gwyneth posted a very interesting (and quite extensive) article on the advantages of merging the 2D with the 3D web here. Flickr link trough Vint Falken.

Posted on: March 7, 2008 | Share on: