Active Web Pages Streamed On SL Objects-- We Have Them

I'm not exactly sure when this feature was added, but then, neither was IBM's Epredator Potato, until he checked recently: Second Life can now display live and active web pages on objects.  Not full interaction just yet, but certainly HTML and Java updates.  The long-awaited "Web on a prim" feature was introduced last March, but at first, could only display mere static web pages-- which subsequently garnered a collective shrug.  Since then, they've become dynamic. Here I am, for example, watching Twittervision updates in my SL office, with the web page displayed on my wall scrolling and refreshing in real time with each new global Tweet.

"The ability to get to web information in a shared fashion always seemed to be a killer app," Mr. Potato writes. "There is so much content out there and people don’t always want to rebuild everything. So in the hunt for interoperability at the data level we also now have some tools to hand in Second Life for interoperability on glass."

Comments

[Princess Ivory]

Is it interactive? Can you post a tweet? Or just watch the new comments that are being made in RL as they post to Twitter?

This has some great potential, but unfortunately, I am picturing it as another horrible ad farmer tool.

Princess Ivory

[Ravishal Bentham]

Actually this is old news as it has been a feature since it's release back in March. I've used a web page on a prim to display this page in world http://www.konastream.com/Chatroom.htm

It won't show the Meebo chat room since it is flash, but it does show the web cam and the SAM3's currently playing function.

Rav

[epredator]

In this case the Linden implementation is a "non interactive" version of a web page. However it is possible to interact by changing the URL via touched items.
Shared web browsing is tricky, like if you are in a RL shop and someone moves the diaply you are looking at. Collaborative web browsing has problems.
However, these pages are not just static images but active pages that can change in realtime.
So, if you posted using bloghud, you webpage would change on the prim.
So yes, it could be used to adverts (but you can hit stop and not view the webcontent).
With increasingly APi related app's like twitter, you can use other backchannels to post out of the environment.
It woudl be great to have a full web browser, for shared browsing, and that will come, but privacy, cookies, form filling etc all are in the hard to fix category.
For me it means we dont have to build another set of xytext objects eating up SL prims to display updated changing information.
There is a cool example of how to potentially interact blogged over here
at "Not Possible IRL" well worth checking out.
Thanks Ailun for pinging me this after seeing the eightbar post.

[Laetizia Coronet]

So now (or soon) Laetizia can enter the Second Life website and join up, the result of which would be a new kind of alt.
I'll leave that to the immersionists to figure out...

[Brian]

"Not full interaction just yet, but certainly HTML and Java updates."

Erm, are you claiming that the pages support Java applets? JavaScript is NOT Java. :) My understanding is there's full HTML support, really strong JS support, and that's about it. Might want to check up on that, because I'm fairly sure there's no Java support yet.

[Nahasa Singh]

Hmmm, excuse my ignorance, but does this mean that one could now embed, for example, a youtube video on a prim ? The mind boggles...

[Richard Meiklejohn]

As several people have pointed out this has been there all along - it's effectively a trimmed mozilla-on-a-prim (No embedded objects like java or flash) One of the first things I did with it when it came out was use this fact to allow the single media URL to appear to display two separate pages or web applications, and by cunning arrangement of frame prims make it look like two screens :-) The savvy educators have been using javascript-based shared whiteboards like skrbl.com to allow drawing in one browser (not in SL) to be sent to their virtual classroom whiteboard in real time :-) I've tried this, it's awesome.

[Opensource Obscure]

Twittervision is based on Javascript, and 'HTML-on-a-parcel' supports Javascript since its introduction.

For example, you could display in-world a nice faded slideshow using something like this script. In web pages, this is often achieved by using Flash, but that wouldn't be supported in SL right now.

[if you're on friendfeed.com, share interesting stuff about SL here: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/secondlife]