Quick link: The Rex Files highlights the ability to import youTube videos into RealXtend.
What’s nice about this is that the videos are brought into the virtual environment via Flash, and that as far as I know there are no “media limits” in realXtend as there are in Second Life. In other words, you could have a video pavillion or wall or whatever with an unlimited number of video streams.
This post reminded me of a couple of things I’ve seen recently. There is another virtual environment that is working hard on embedding YouTube into their environment. In my search to find that story, I stumbled onto ExitReality’s semi solution to embedded videos… They talk about connecting blinkx.com’s database to a 3D world, allowing users to search all of blink’s database. Here’s the story on Exit Reality’s site – http://blog.exitreality.com/3d-social-networking/virtual-world-video-search-32-million-hours-of-video-in-less-than-10-seconds/
Originally I thought it was Just Leap In that had recently embedded YouTube, but I don’t believe it was. Maybe it was Twinity. I know that Active Worlds just recently offered YouTube support, as well.
When you talked about media limits in Second Life, what did you mean? Did you mean that each “object” is limited to one media stream or something else?
Jim – yes, I was talking about the fact that you can only run one media stream per parcel, thus limiting you to one prim per parcel that can carry video or Web. I’d like to be able to stand and watch 4-5 streams maybe, or have 2 youTube videos available and 2-3 Flash movies or something without having to parcel the sim and move my avatar from parcel to parcel just so I can view.
Seems to me that the RealXtend solution might also be able to play looped Flash animations as well, but I’m not sure whether they can play without the user activating them – it would be nice if they’d play without prompting, taking ‘animated textures’ to a whole new level.
Of course, all of this speaks to REALLY wanting HTML on a prim. Mind you, the downside is managing it all – if every prim could have a media stream, you’d need to consider load on the user’s system.
And yes on Exit Reality. That’s their whole model really, embedded Web pages. Neat approach.
Dusan -
HTML coded onto objects in any environment would definitely be a sort of ground breaking idea. I do have one question though: is it better to fuse the 2D and 3D internet together (using a method like making 3D objects encodable with html) or is it better to pioneer something completely different? I mean, something that pushes that does something different than allowing us to plaster 3d objects with the 2d web.
One example: 3d malls where users walk around, look at objects, and “buy” them in real life. This has been tried before, but it failed horribly; probably because its much more clunky, and much slower than shopping on a web page. Are there other alternatives that would make it more appealing than shopping on the 2d web? I guess that’s why ExitReality’s ploy to let you browse videos inside the browser (although it could be done using HTML encoding like you suggested) is something that is kind of fascinating me right now.
This comment turned into a novel!
Jim
P.S. Sorry about the wonky link up top that seems to be encroaching into the rest of your page… I have no idea how that happened.