Second Life live and active web pages on a prim – I never knew it did that
I have to admit to be rather excited about what we just discovered about the web page on a prim elements in Second Life now. For some reason I had assumed that the new drop downs on land management that let you replace a texture with a web page (as opposed to a video or jpg image from a URL) were simply going to render a flat image of a page. This is the pattern that had been used by third parties and also by some of out internal work in the early days of SL.
I had experimented a little with the new drop down when it went live some time ago, but today I happened to hit a page (in this case our French Open site whilst investigating some Wimbledon options.
The page rendered very well, lots of detail, readable etc, but I then noticed that the clock was flashing on the page. It was changing in real time.
Apologies to all the people who have been working on this, probably blogging to, but I had made an incorrect assumption. The web page is being rendered by the client and on top of that, whilst it cant run flash, it can cope with html and javascript based changes. For those of us on corporate networks it can also render things inside our firewalls as its client side once the URL is set by the land parcel.
Interaction is still a problem of course, but we have ways around that. The ability to get to web information in a shared fashion always seemed to be a killer app. There is so much content out there and people don’t always want to rebuild everything. So in the hunt for interoperability at the data level we also now have some tools to hand in Second Life for interoperability on glass.
To highlight the dynamic nature of this here is a video of twittervision doing its thing in SL.
June 9th, 2008 at 16:49
But since it is client side rendering we’re not necessarily seeing the same content, correct? If you and I have different cookies on a particular site (e.g. I’m logged in and you’re not), we might see different things, even if we’re standing next to each other looking at the same prim?
June 9th, 2008 at 17:22
Correct, the synching of content may be an issue where various personalizations occur. However, as we cant interact and login as such we may find that things such as information board designed to show the same content work better anyway.
So for personalized web browsing, unique to you then regular web browser is all thats needed.
Collaborative web browsing, needs a common view. So a regular non personalized webpage with a known URL is just fine.
June 11th, 2008 at 15:32
so are links clickable yet?
June 11th, 2008 at 15:50
See Zero Linden’s recent office hours for possible directions for this technology (with an emphasis on the plural). http://tinyurl.com/3sl3m7
June 11th, 2008 at 18:48
No, links are not yet clickable. Thought about making invisiprims where the links were, and moving them around for the different rendered urls — but that was far too time consuming. Will end up with a menu for links ot several ‘key’ pages for the site.
June 12th, 2008 at 08:34
[...] le player ne le supporte pas. Rien de neuf sous le soleil donc… sauf que un peu par hasard, epredator de Eightbar s’est rendu compte que certaine fonctionnalités d’affichages dynamiques sont bien [...]
June 12th, 2008 at 10:20
This has I think been the case all along – it’s effectively a trimmed mozilla-on-a-prim. One of the first things I did with it when it came out was created a page that auto-updated itself via XMLHttpRequest in javascript from a PHP server. And the savvy educators have been using javascript-based shared whiteboards to allow drawing in one browser (not in SL) to be sent to their virtual classroom whiteboard in real time :-) I’ve tried this, it’s awesome.
June 15th, 2008 at 22:23
[...] (as compared to using a media stream on a parcel) but we’re getting close. As Epredator notes on Eightbar (and Hamlet [...]
June 17th, 2008 at 16:54
[...] still unsure about representing the ball flow again this year, for various reasons as I alluded to in the previous post around web page on a prim. For me the complications and social interactions that can happen around collaborative web browsing [...]
July 8th, 2008 at 05:14
tests time mashine
June 16th, 2009 at 20:03
How you do that and where can i find this great idea in-world?