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The 3D web: try it now…

Written on 8th January 2008 18 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

I remember downloading the first VRML browser in 1999. It promised to show me the web in 3D fashion. Unfortunately it never went anywhere. Until now, maybe.

Check this video of a 3D browser built by SpaceTime and demonstrated during CES yesterday. It shows an Apple CoverFlow like interface to many popular websites. In this example eBay is used. The first 10 seconds are boring but don’t look away:

Can you imagine browsing the web like this? What would your site or this blog look like in 3D? What would be the advantage of browsing like this? One thing is for sure; don’t try this on dial-up.

Want to try it yourself? Download SpaceTime 1.0 (Windows only, for now) and let us know how it worked for you.

By the way, have you checked out this 3D post as well? It allows you to search through the web cover flow style.

18 Comments »

About the author: Serial entrepreneur and founder of several companies. Current activities include TwitterCounter.com & this Blog. Boris is also very active on Twitter: @Boris

18 comments/trackbacks to “The 3D web: try it now…”

Jan 9, 2008: Warren Ellis » links for 2008-01-09
[...] The 3D web: try it now… a virtual-3D browser that, in the example video, turns eBay into something like Apple CoverFlow… (tags: web) [...]

By Robert Gaal on Jan 8, 2008

I wish they actually made it more like Coverflow. When you browse away from one point it leaves your screen, that can’t be that handy.

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By Jeroen Bakker on Jan 8, 2008

This is a great way of viewing and browsing (or a better word is of course exploring) lists of products like on eBay, images on Flickr, videos on YouTube and other image rich information. But I’m having a hard time translating this to text-based information like blog posts…

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By Sjors on Jan 8, 2008

Although I like the idea, and I see some usefull cases with it, actuallly using it with mouse and keyboard could be a problem, but this on a enormous apple iphone like interface would be a dream come true. (As far as i remembered there are some demo’s from microsoft with those huge touch screens?)

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By Peter on Jan 8, 2008

Looks cool but the problem (as always) is whether it is more than just a novelty and if the interaction can be sustained for longer periods, raising the question “Is it really usable?”

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By Jeff's co-worker on Jan 8, 2008

My co-worker says it won’t become popular until it supports porn. Then WATCH OUT!

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By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Jan 8, 2008

Ah yes, sex sells. Usually innovation is quickly adopted in the adult entertainment world. I wonder how long it will be until we see the implemented there…

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By Patrick de Laive on Jan 9, 2008

A trackback from Warren Ellis! That is so cool!

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By jon on Jan 9, 2008

Looks more a novelty application than anything actually useful although it still looks pretty cool.

FF 4.0 maybe?

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By Noah Nelson on Jan 9, 2008

Has anyone noticed the new(ish) button in the full screen view for YouTube? It has three “nodes” that are linked together by two lines. When you click on that all these little “bubbles” appear. I only saw this yesterday as I rarely use full screen YouTube. Look like they’ve had it fr a few weeks now.

This “coverflow” 3d web browser reminded me of this.

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By Patrick de Laive on Jan 9, 2008

@Noah Yes that is a new interface for discovering related videos. They’ve been experimenting with it a little bit. During Christmas for instance this interface came up after all videos, instead of their normal related video interface. They’ve switched to the “three nodes button” later on.

I really like that interface, but it is not really useful.

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By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Jan 9, 2008

I do like the new Youtube interface! I have noticed I watch a lot more now that this feature is here…

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By Rizwan on Jan 9, 2008

i love it. works great. especially the search results. just love the way it auto generates every page in the results so can flip through them rather than just look at the result description. i do a lot of internet researh and this is very useful. very impressed. goodbye internet explorer!

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By pixites on Jan 9, 2008

as I mentioned earlier this morning on twitter: http://www.findinternettv.com/

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By ale on Jan 9, 2008

Is this tool useful? I say no, when you browse from a page to the next, you lose sight of the page that you have left “behind”.

I think that the usefulness of apple coverflow is the fact that you can have contingent information one next to the other and keep them all in front of you.

I think there are new useful ways of information displaying, but this is not one of them

PS: I discovered this blog today, from techcrunch and it’s awesome, congratulation
The usefulness of apple coverflow

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By Rockear on Jan 9, 2008

So what *would* be useful? I think it’d be handy if this hooked into the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Hit a key combo and your webbrowser shifts to a 45-degree perspective timeline of all the previous versions of the page captured by archive.org. I mean, jeez, it’s called Space_TIME_, put the TIME back into webbrowsing.

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By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Jan 9, 2008

@Rockear: now that would be fantastic! Lets contact Brewster Kahle and suggest this to him and the people from SpaceTime…

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By Brad McLoughlin on Jan 11, 2008

Meh. 3D browsing is more awkward than a 2D UI, lets face it. Zoomable UI is where its at.

The actual design of this seems a little laborious, I don’t really see it improving Ui or taking off in any way.

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