More on vSide

 Posted by (Visited 5579 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Jul 302009
 

Virtual Worlds News has been following the story. Apparently ExitReality bought the assets (meaning, the vSide tech and IP, so they are the new operators). Then Doppelganger disbanded as an entity. Then a bit later, some the people from Doppelganger resurfaced at a new company called Real Life Plus.

There’s some screenshots (looks like prerendered concept art) from this new project on their Facebook page.

No word from ExitReality on what exactly they are going to be doing with the vSide assets. They have their own client and server tech based on X3D, so presumably they are mostly interested in the assets and the vSide userbase.

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ExitReality

 Posted by (Visited 8016 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Sep 172008
 

ExitReality launched in open beta today and there is coverage in a few places. Virtual Worlds News has detailed coverage with lots of interview questions, while CNet has a slightly more critical article.

What does it do? It automatically grabs web content and sticks it into a 3d space. You can shape the 3d space if you want, but it does it by default — no work for the site owner. It also slurps 3d content of all sorts from basically anywhere to let you build with it. I don’t know what the scripting is like, and it (like most all the 3d solutions) is based on a plugin, and one that as of yet is still limited to Windows. But that seems like an obvious thing to want to remedy.

I haven’t tried it out yet, but it does seem like an important transitional step in some ways. It’s still the notion that people want to see websites in 3d, which I think is basically wrong, but it does it in a manner that is much more like the web than past attempts.

It will be interesting to see where this one goes.

ExitReality: another VRML world

 Posted by (Visited 7021 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
May 282008
 

ExitReality Launches With Carl’s Jr Deal, and it looks like another attempt to commercialize VRML, much like several of the other projects we have seen over the last couple of years.

The comment thread is interesting precisely because of its mix of reactions:

This is really nice! Really love to check it out. It can turn any web page into 3D space? How can this be done? Amazing stuff!

to

I’d like one double failburger to go.

One commenter makes the point that has to be made about any plug-in based approach to the problem: what about adoption of the plug-in? Most people simply say no to all plug-in install requests. This is a significant challenge across the web — it takes really compelling content to drive adoption.

In any case, ExitReality seems to have some nice features that seem to rapidly be becoming de rigueur: HTML on a polygon, video on a polygon, etc. Not sure how they did the Burger Time emulation — Flash on a poly? Most interesting is the “install and automatically make a 3d space from your webpage” thing that is hinted at. It’s not that hard to do, really — pass in the URL to the world, and have the world scrape the page for assets to use — but it potentially makes a page a bit more compelling.

Edit: Apparently there’s a MySpace app as well, which connects to the branded worlds.