ExitReality Launch – The Entire Web in 3D!

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Permalink Reply by clemens fobianke on September 18, 2008 at 8:43am

first visit .-) works nice with my own site - one step further than gogofrog. congrat!!

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Permalink Reply by Bruce Lehmann on September 18, 2008 at 12:36pm

I checked it out and it works well. Alot of people on but nobody seemed to have a clue. You still have to depend on your buddy list to see who is where in other places, hopefully that can change. I tried adding a few items but that didn't seem to work yet. Remember it is still in beta though. The knowledge Base isn't back online yet so we'll see how that goes. You cannot use viewpoints, there is no "right mouse click for settings and the F keys are not available, so your movements are restricted to walking and beaming to people. A problem when new people step off the edge of something and can't get back. Aside from all that, it looks good and runs fairly smooth. There is a button at the bottom of this (WBandD) that will launch it into ExitReality, so give it a try.

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Permalink Reply by ExitReality on September 18, 2008 at 6:53pm

Thanks for the feedback mate. Will get back to soon with some answers.

Cheers, Tanoj

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Permalink Reply by Bruce Lehmann on September 18, 2008 at 7:54pm

After further playing around, there are some key commands you can use. For example, to fly (control+shift+f), slide (control+shift+s), walk (control+shift+w - except in a tabbed browser like Crazy Browsere, which will cause it to try to close all the tabs), and return to the entry (esc), etc. so good going Exit Reality. :-)

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Permalink Reply by Bruce Lehmann on September 19, 2008 at 12:40am

Here is a video nof the Launch :-)


Find more videos like this on WBandD

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Permalink Reply by Doctor on September 19, 2008 at 2:19am

I was present during the public beta launch and had great difficulties with the software.
The 3D rendering was fine -- smooth movement, nice appearance.
However, I found that the buttons and fields in the side panels were off of the edge of the panels, and since the panels do not allow one to resize them I could not access most features. In the chat panel, for instance, the input box is beyond the bottom of the panel edge and only by chance did I discover that I could get to that input line by using the tab key. Not only do these panels not allow for resizing, but they also do not provide scrollbars if their widgets are out of visibility.
I realize that I could play around with windows fonts, screen resolution, and accessibility options, but this would mess up other software that I work with that would become unreadable. It would be much more convenient if ExitReality panels could at least be resized, or better yet the software could also query windows for resolution, font size settings and accessibility magnification factors, and then use that information to ensure that all the panel widgets are visible in the panel.

It would also be nice for program to allow for changing ones 3rd-person-view relative to ones own avatar, as well as the ability to toggle from first and third person view. That is, it would be nice to be able to change the viewing distance to the avatar, the viewing height, to be able to rotate the view around the avatar and view it from the front, etc.

A final question I have for the ExitReality designers is "What 3D format is it using? Is it VRML97 or X3D? Is there a way for us to view my own VRML file in ExitReality multiuser chat?"
Perhaps I have just not investigated ExitReality deeply enough and the answers to these questions are already available somewhere.

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Permalink Reply by Doctor on September 19, 2008 at 2:38am

Here is a screen snapshot of what I see in ExitReality (assuming that the image upload to this site worked correctly). Notice that the chatbox is missing many important items, and the top edit bar is almost completely cut off. I can't even imagine what is hidden in the buddy list box, which can't even be moved, let alone resized.

Attachments:

• ExitReality01.JPG, 288 KB

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Permalink Reply by Bruce Lehmann on September 19, 2008 at 12:46pm

Yes, there is a way to view your own files in Exit Reality. There are instructions (or were) on their site for diong it. Also, there are instructions for linking your own world on WBandD in the blog on the front page called, "linking". I am also not fond of the default view where I see my avatars back, but there is a button at the bottom that will change that. It would be nice to see arouns the AV.

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Permalink Reply by Bruce Lehmann on September 20, 2008 at 1:29am

Just tried it again tonight (Sept5. 19) and now the F2 and F9 keys work. Good job. The F2 will get you the Viewpoints and movements settings. The F9 gets you the preferences. Nice improvement :-) One strange thing, you can see some avatars, but not others, no matter how long you are in.

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Permalink Reply by Bruce Lehmann on September 20, 2008 at 9:07pm

I agree with Jordi 100%. This kind of "cavalier" attitude about others creations is one of the things that started this content discussion on WBandD.. It is one thing to offer them as places to go while giving credit to the creator or at least aknowledging honestly where it came from, it is completely another to re-name it, which gives the appearence of being their own attraction. I too like Exit Reality and would like to see it grow, but not at the expense of the original creators. It will be sad if some of these people pull their worlds down because of this. That will be a loss to everyone.

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Permalink Reply by Rory on September 24, 2008 at 8:54am

Hi,

We use a crawler to collect urls of wrl files for linking in our web 3d search engine.
Its useragent string is ExitRealitySearchAgent.

This crawler obeys the normal robot.txt set of rules for search engines as described
in:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt

To address the issue that has been describe on this forum I suggest these entries to
tell the ExitReality spider not to index vrml worlds on your domain:

User-agent: ExitRealitySearchAgent
Disallow: /*.wrl$

User-agent: ExitRealitySearchAgent
Disallow: /*.wrz$

To ensure your site is crawled quickly I would also suggest submitting your domain
for a priority spidering at the following url once your robot.txt file has been
updated.

http://www.exitreality.com/submiturl.php

Also I noted Paul Aslin's post on the public web 3d mailing lists in regards to vrml
browsers providing referrer in the http header. We already provide a referrer in the
http headers when our browser makes a request. This contains the referring file
(whether it is html or vrml) and was implemented to help prevent deep linking.

Your webserver can be configured to disallow deeplinking by checking this referrer and
constraining it to referrers that you allow. Configuration of this is dependant on your
hosting service and the type of http server they use.

All this information will be fasttracked to our knowledgebase the assist others who
share these concerns.

We have read your comments on our web 3d search and are discussing your suggestions. I
would like to take this opportunity to state our intentions for the web 3d search. We do
not intend it to pass off others work as our own, rather the search is meant to provide
an accessible way for people to find and view 3d content.

Thanks for your interest and please feel free contribute feedback.

Rory Hart
Head of Development
ExitReality
http://www.exitreality.com

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