Everything else is available in 3D (movies, televisions, the real world), so why not 3D browsing? I recently came across this demo video of a 3D browsing experience created using WebGL, HTML5, Javascript and the Mozilla Audio API. Is this the future of Web browsing?
I’m not extremely fluent in all of these technologies (for more info, see Flight of the Navigator), but as a demo, this is pretty impressive. To me, it looks a little like Second Life with tons of screens out to the internet. In other words, slick and different, but I’m not sure how useful, or even how truly integrated this experience would be. Would you rather navigate to different places on the Web by moving through a 3D space or by Ctrl-Tabbing to the next open tab in your browser? Maybe I’m old-school, but the latter seems far easier to me.
Of course, there are lots of other demos posted online and it will be interesting to see where this goes. Checking your favorite Twitter feeds in-game would certainly blur the line between the gaming experience and the real world, but is this necessary? Probably not, but maybe that’s not the question to be asking with whiz-bang technology like this. It certainly opens up interesting avenues for the greater integration of a wide range of technologies. Where that takes us will be interesting to see.
ESL Technology.com 