Other World Notes: Stanford's Sirikata Virtual World Can Display Dynamic, Fully Interactive Web Pages

Update, 6/3: Video demo of this tech now available here.

As striking as it was, Christa Lopes' teleportation code was not the most impressive thing I saw at last week's Metaverse U. Equally exciting was what you're looking at, above: it's a photo I took during a demo of Sirikata, the open source virtual world currently under development at Stanford. As you can see by the grassy fields and the blue sky, it's a natural world simulation, much like Second Life. But the big news, of course, is what's going on in that panel in the center of the field.

That's a Chrome web browser page displaying in Sirikata. But not just a static web page with limited interaction, as is possible in SL since last year. No:

The Chrome web page is running a Flash video in Sirikata. After the demo, I got a chance to quiz some Sirikata developers. Yes, they told me, you can interact with Flash-based pages in Sirikata. Could I play the Flash game Desktop Tower Defense in Sirikata? Yes, they said, you could. You could access Gmail and use Google Docs in Sirikata, they added. This is a goal first envisioned by Philip Rosedale, of a metaverse that swallowed the web -- first realized not in Second Life, but in Sirikata, a project directed in part by ex-Linden staffer Henrik Bennetsen. It's still in early stages, set for an Alpha release any month now; without any hands-on experience, it's difficult for to determine if it's as robust as they say it is. But with the rate of metaverse-based innovations increasing, I'm pretty sure we'll see even more soon.

Comments

[Ener Hax]

wow, this is a great post! thank you! to be able to interact with flash opens many possibilities isl (i have done flash for 10 years now . . . )

[JeanRicard Broek]

The technology has been around for awhile...
See -> http://jeanricardbroek-architect.blogspot.com/2009/03/more-explorations-into-html-on-prim.html

The blog post showed Awesomium, an up-and-coming library that allows developers to easily embed web-content in their applications. You can find out more information at: http://princeofcode.com/awesomium.php

The demo was made with Awesomium v1.0, Ogre3D, and OIS. The history behind this code is interesting since the technology, and early libraries were developed by someone from Linden Lab at least 2 years ago.

We also reported on Solipis and showed their video from early 2008 demonstrating the same functionality:

http://jeanricardbroek-architect.blogspot.com/2009/03/html-in-prim-not-in-sl-but-solipsis.html

It has also been reported that the realXtend team has tested this code and may include it in their Next Viewer.

[Henrik Bennetsen]

Thank you for the kind words. We are also really excited about Sirikata and actively looking for developers with strong C++ skills to help out with building this new open source platform.

To give your readers a sense I threw together this little video demo:

http://www.vimeo.com/4969011

Huge props for this work belongs to our developer Adam for pulling this of. His site is at http://www.princeofcode.com/ and there you can find all the code for this. It is open source and in a separate library so other systems can benefit from his great work as well.

Ps. JeanRicard (the poster above) is right that this work was started a while back and has been public in earlier iterations.