Many think that a proper networked 2D browser is a must-have feature for virtual world platforms. This is true especially for business applications. Having seen this, one can imagine how all the applications could be launched into a 3D virtual space.
Sirikata is an
BSD licensed open source platform for games and virtual worlds. The
platform's first 2Q/2009 release date is going to be soon as the
second quarter of 2009 is ending.
Below is a video of how a web browser looks inside a Sirikata
virtual world. It is fully interactive and plays flash, although it
is not evident whether the web page is fully synchronized between
participants - which is not a simple issue to solve.
The slick user interface makes one wonder whether it is easy to
add other applications too to create a 3D workspace. It must be a
lot easier to manage applications when they can be placed in
different locations instead of a small 2D desktop space. Imagine a
small hill for the browsers, and a peaceful lake scenery for the
word processor... I could even hide some spreadsheets behind the
hill to keep stats from the nearby First-Person-Shooter game. Hope
they make the application windows rocket-proof?
Expect to hear more about Sirikata in the near future!
Sirikata Browser Demo
from Sirikata on Vimeo.
Standalone demo of the built in Sirikata browser running in this
video. More on Sirikata at http://Sirikata.com
The code running the demo is open source and available as a
library from http://princeofcode.com