My first stop at this weekends International Technology Expo in Second Life was at the SLInternet stand, a company making strides toward bringing web like functionality into Second Life.
Anyone that's been in SL for more than 5 minutes will know that even just linking together notecards (simple text files) is a pain, and that web like functionality is seriously needed for things like advertising, information, and educational resources inworld. With that in mind, SLInternet, which launches at this years ITE Expo hopes to provide that functionality with what it calls SLHTML and a trio of technologies.
The three basic components to SLInternet are:
- Browser
- Server and
- Display
The server can be either a virtual SL server included in the package, or a regular web server. The browser comes in the shape of an SL object that looks like a laptop, that projects the parsed SLHTML onto a display. The display itself resembles, and functions like a touchscreen.
Arnout Sequent, the guy who was kind enough to demonstrate the SLInternet app for me showed me that you can do a great many of the things you might expect a web page to do. Play media, link pages, format nice displays of text, lists etc etc and allow a fair amount of interactivity and control for the end uers. He pointed out that for stores, educational institutes and pretty much anyone wanting to provide information inworld in a familiar format, it was very useful.
II have to say, I loved what i saw. It was neat, I understood it, it was attractive and simple to look at and I can see companies in SL using this as a great information hub in landing areas on their sites. As a long term solution it may have limited appeal though, as Ubrowser, the so called "web on a prim" project from a Linden Employee that uses an instance of Mozilla to render real web content in 3D could kill it dead.
Additional
I spoke to Arnout once more after writing this story and he assures me that far from kill SLInternet, LLmozLib, the libraray uBrowser is based on will just enhance it. It will add functionality, and SLInterent will then have the best of both worlds (if you'll pardon the pun) as it will combine regular web browsing with the SL interactivity and object communication built into the project as it stands now.