The Metaverse is meant to be everywhere one day - augmenting reality, mirroring it, a separate space, the 3D Web wherever you go. But we’re already much of the way there.

With RocketOn you can take your avatar with you, mosh hopping on top of youTube videos.

Same idea with Weblin, about which I previously posted.

But avatars in flat spaces is only part of the battle. Browser-based virtual worlds let you embed Web pages or youTube videos, but it’s not quite the 3D Web.

At Smashing Magazine an article on “Web Browsers You’ve Never Heard Of” highlights a few “3D browsers” amongst, well, browsers I’ve never heard of. Among them the uBrowser, which HTML on a prim in Second Life will be based on:

Browse3D gives you one of those Flickr wall type applications similar to popular Papervision interfaces although this uses the IE Rendering Engine.

Smashing calls 3B a bit too complicated for casual surfing (whether it’s really that much of a browser is another question, looks more like a highly embedded 3D chat appliance):

“3B is another 3D browser. Although it looks interesting, it’s also very commercial. To use the browser you need to register on the site. After registration you can navigate through 3D-rooms, which can be designed and customized by other users of the browser. This is quite exciting and unusual, however also quite complicated and slow. You can use a chat as well.”

The article is otherwise a nice little reminder that there’s more than one interface for the Web.

Which reminds me - does anyone else find that the latest Firefox update crashes every 5 minutes?