This is cool, I really hope the OpenSim guys good luck.

The main limitation is that this is server side, so interactivity is restricted. The client does not tell the server where on a prim the user clicked when they “touch” it.

So currently the only real thing that can be done is changing the url of the page that is to be displayed. Also our script function allows for the refresh rate to be set, so someone could have a prim displaying a website such as a blog on their opensim and know that it will always be displaying the upto date page.

It would also be useful for someone making a presentation, allowing them to display web pages related to it. (and change the sites/pages being displayed as the presentation progresses WITHOUT having to deal with a lot of textures in their inventory and swapping between them)

There are a few things that we will be trying out to see if we can increate the interactivity, but real inworld interactive web browsing will need client changes.

Can I somehow ping the script from web to refresh? (would be excellent for blogs)
Scrolling could be doable? (yet complicated?)

And yeah, Bella gave me the (friendly) lexure on ubrowser. =d

I’m sure we could add some way of the server being told when to update a page. Should be able to add sort sort of “webservice” to the the html module, that could be called to signal a update.

Just to be clear, incase I made it sound like it was scripts doing all the updating and rendering of the html, its not. The rendering and texture updating is handled by a “module” of opensim (likely to actually be a optional module, so not all opensims will have to support this) and then there is a script function (ie a llfuctionname type, except it is OSfunctionname) that will inform the module of the various things (like what page to display on what prim and how often to refresh it). Just wanted to explain that incase people were thinking of it being lots of complex scripts running.

Sorry if that got a bit too technical.

If there is a ping/refresh possibility, that is a freaking mighty thing!
If I made my picture correctly, it is displaying rendered page on a prim. Which kind of prims? It accept HTML formating, .pngs (animated? :p ), anything else? Will it be server-killing?

OH, btw, I’m glad to see the first two letters of built-in functions.
And, thanks.

OMG! YES! This is totally in line with my vision for blog publicity in SL.

Will it be server-killing?

Thats is one things we have to be careful of; rendering lots of html pages can take up a lot of processing power. So with that it mind, I’ve now made the system more modular.

There is a general dynamic texture module that manages all the update timing and the putting the texture image onto the prim etc. But now there are also render/converter modules that register themselves with the dynamic texture module saying that they know how to render whatever format into a texture. So one of the benefits of this, is that now the core function of those render modules can (if required) be on other computers. All the dynamic texture modules requires of them is the image data.

So if a person expects their regions to support a lot of dynamic textures then they could easily set up another computer on the same Lan (or even if wanted anywhere on the internet) that handled the rendering. (One such computer could handle the rendering for a number of regions)

Another benefit of having these rendering modules is that different types can be wrote. I’m currently experimenting with a PDF one. So with that, a prim can be displaying a page from a PDF file (somewhere on the internet) and a script could change pages etc, maybe responding to a user touching that prim or another prim (ie maybe pagedown/pageup prims being next to the display one).

So to start with, we should have modules supporting these two file formats (html and pdf).

Btw, the answer to “Which kind of prims?” is any prims.

WOOT! Finally we’re ahead of LL :-P.

please enable to “select font”.
not reason of design.
some LATIN font is not include japanese charactor;-)

Any kind of prims?! mmmmm….. genuine metaversal clothes :p finaly

[…] OpenSIM named Ruth, and another post about how OpenSIM already has the ability to use HTML on a prim (something LL has been promising for ages).  Here was my chance to check out an OpenSIM that […]

[…] OpenSIM named Ruth, and another post about how OpenSIM already has the ability to use HTML on a prim (something LL has been promising for ages). Here was my chance to check out an OpenSIM that […]

[…] Gwyneth posted a very interesting (and quite extensive) article on the advantages of merging the 2D with the 3D web here. Flickr link trough Vint Falken. […]

Want some limited interactivity?

Two Words: Prim Imagemaps …

Ok go play :) - that’s going to get us over the hump until we have true surface clicking..