On yesterday’s Hmmcast I lamented that the new Ask3D isn’t truly 3D, it’s shameless marketing speak. This morning I learned about, downloaded and checked out SpaceTime which promises 3D search results from Google and Yahoo, image search from Google and Flickr and 3D eBay auction search. While it does present results from those sites in a 3D space, it isn’t useful. Some, of many, downsides to this effort:

- Windows only
- slow unless you have a really fast computer (I have 128MB graphics card and 2GB of RAM on this system and it’s still pokey)
- text of results of pages coming at you in 3D aren’t very legible, forcing you to double-click on the pages to load and move back to 2D. A truly 3D browser should keep as much in three dimensions as possible
- no bookmarking capability, as Duncan notes
- limited interaction. You can plod forward and back through results in groups of 10 but you can’t move around the objects or actually do anything with the search results. It’s like looking at badly rendered screenshots.

Something that has more potential if they ever get it done is web on a prim inside Second Life. Or better yet, a competing world that works better than Second Life.

Would be much more real world useful bringing 3D into an existing virtual world rather than trying to take 2D and dress it up in a 3D user interface. Last month at VTOR I wrote about how the Ubrowser project is coming along. UBrowser uses OpenGL® and an embedded instance of Gecko, the Mozilla® rendering engine and allows more interaction than SpaceTime within 3D space. You can even type into forms, conduct searches on pages all while rotating the pages on a cube.

Gotta love the first frequently asked question on the Ubrowser FAQ page:

This is all a bit pointless isn’t it? No one wants to browse in 3D… Well, yeah but, no but, yeah but… It’s really just an illustration of how to embed the Mozilla® Gecko rendering engine.

Despite being more proof of concept than application, Ubrowser outduels SpaceTime on every level. Don’t bother with this Space, this Time.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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