Daden Launches Web Browser in Second Life

Daden Limited announced today that it had created a Web browser, the Daden Navigator, for use in the virtual world Second Life. The technology is built on Linden Lab's HTML on a Prim technology launched in March, so it includes those limitations (no Flash, Java, or forms), but will launch difficult pages in users' external Web browsers. The big benefit, says Daden, is the ease of integration and collective viewing. I'm traveling right now, so I haven't had a chance to try out Daden's browser, but one major limitation of Linden's default implementation is that users don't necessarily see the same content when looking at the in-world browser. The Daden Navigator "allows residents of the virtual world to collaboratively browse the web, sharing one web screen between users who may, in real life, live on different continents."

In a nice coincidence, the MIT Technology review has an article today on Linden's own efforts to bring Web data into its virtual world. Joe Miller,VP of platform and technology development, told MIT that the company is continuing to work on making it easier to bring Flash into Second Life as well as developing shared document technology that would let users work collaboratively as on a virtual white board.  The company's Web Media Initiative plans to deliver technologies making it easier to share Word and PowerPoint docs in world by the end of the year.

"What we're trying to do is create a capability to create a rich way to experience a variety of media types that typically have to be seen or read or processed on the Web in 2-D," said Miller.

All that points to Second Life becoming an increasingly valuable tool for organizations to collaborate and share information--a sentiment Daden shares.

"Second Life is proving to be a great environment for serious business uses such as virtual meetings, collaboration, training and education," MD David Burden said in a statement. "However even here users have been hampered by the inability to access ad-hoc web based content to support a meeting, training or learning session. Now users can be given instant access to almost any web content to support their use of Second Life - and share that web session with any other SL users wherever they may be in the real world."

The Daden Navigator sells for L$2400 on Daden's Second Life island. [SLURL]

Comments

[Simon Newstead]

First I read this the wrong way around and thought a new browser-based Second Life client had been released.. oops :)

Anyway, it's quite cool having a collaborative browser in virtual world vs the standard today where each user views their own version.

Do any of the virtual worlds today let you project a web browser onto a non flat 3D surface?

I had heard about Kaneeva animated clothing, but haven't yet seen it for myself..

[David Burden]

In SL web-on-a-prim is implemented through the media texture, so that can be on any shape you want - I just made a torus shaped screen and a floppy one that falls over like a jelly and then blows in the wind! That's why we kept the Daden Navigator separate from the "screen". Now if only Linden would let us have multiple media streams per parcel...

[Peter]

This company called yoowalk is doing something similar. Creating a virtual world developed in flash which lets you ''walk around the web'' with an avatar. You browse 3D versions of websites called walksites. Its still in beta but cool nonetheless. Check it out www.yoowalk.com

[Feeg Nootan]

What I want is to have the ability to override the stream per avatar. That way you can show information to a specific avatar without everyone in the area seeing it. Also, so others can use the screen at the same time to see their own version of that information.

[Feeg Nootan]

Referring to my previous comment, it seems to be possible. For anyone curious, use llParcelMediaCommandList's PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_AGENT attribute to set the command to only affect a single avatar.