Caleb Booker

The Odd Case of ExitReality

I was recently invited to provide my professional opinion about ExitReailty, so I spent a little time to take another look. I’m struggling with it.

On one hand, it’s full of potential. Browser-based virtual spaces are our best bet for mass adoption of 3D-internet concepts and conventions, so obviously this leads right into that paradigm. You can pop almost any webpage into the address bar, install a tiny plugin, and you’re instantly wandering around that page in a 3D environment. The environments are easy to alter, and the graphic quality of your avatar isn’t bad at all.

On the other hand, is 3D right for 2D content? There are some things that virtual worlds do really well – they give you a sense of having an experience, and allow you to participate (as Sandy Kearney of IBM has often pointed out). I don’t think we’re doing that, however, when wandering around a 3D space looking at someone’s MySpace page, or a blog (see a screenshot of mine in 3D by clicking on the thumbnail above), or even a YouTube video.

Sure, potentially you could sit down in the theater-like seats and watch a YouTube clip with a few friends… but the clips are less than 10 minutes long. After that you have to leave the room to watch another. That’s not much of an experience, and you can’t do much to participate.

So while the on-the-fly translation of 2D content into 3D is really cool, I don’t think these applications are really making ExitReality shine. There are a few things that could work:

1. Galleries – Well this is a bit of a no-brainer I suppose. The one thing they did really right was put a Flickr tab on the address bar. In the real world people don’t often go somewhere to read text on walls, but they sure do travel to see pictures there. To make this killer: have a single space dedicated to Flickr, organized by tags, that you could accidentally meet people interested in roughly the same kind of thing you are.
2. Chat Room – You might argue that it does this automatically, but a really good gathering space in 3D doesn’t look much like the automatically generated spaces we’re seeing here. People should be able to make a stand-alone space not based on any page, link web-hosted graphics to it, tie in a little streaming music, and then have the text chat available in 2D (output only) to draw people into the 3D environment. To make this killer: incorporate VOIP and webcam feeds.
3. Meeting Spaces – Obviously I’m biased here as I work for Clever Zebra and we’re arranging the vBusiness Expo, but easy to use 3D meeting spaces are in huge demand. If I could just get a custom-built meeting room that people could visit by clicking a button on my webpage, that would be huge. To make this killer: Design a demo for a customer support scenario, including having the customer service agent creating downloadable PDF links on the fly for the user to click on to help them find what they need.

This is off the top of my head of course, but you get the general idea. The initial applications of ExitReality are really missing the mark, but down the road, who knows. They just need to find the right application.