Sunday, December 27, 2009

New(ish) Web-based Open Sim Viewer

Have just checked out the new 3Di Open Source web-based simulator viewer.

Bother is that they only have windows builds, due to the use of the Irrlicht games engine as underlying software. Works in Firefox and IE 7.0, and source has a BSD licence.

Looks good on the outside, will be testing and reporting on its usefulness as we play with its capabilities. Such web-based solutions can only help the business use of virtual worlds, as it opens up SAAS, web deliverable solutions. While I have commented about the need to also have dowloadable document-like worlds, there is nothing wrong with a slick well produced web-delivered piece of software.

BTW, a QUT graduate, Johan Berntsson is on the development team.

Ross

2 comments:

Zaki said...

Hi,

Thanks for checking out Rei.
As you say, currently Rei is Windows-only, but the underlying Irrlicht engine can be made cross-platform. The viewer itself doesn't only run in the browser, there is a standalone app too, that was run successfully on linux (see http://zaki.asia/2009/11/05/irrlicht-netcp-rei-on-linux/ that is a little dated now, as things have moved on and everything is now in the master branch).

Linux support is not 100% yet unfortunately, it will take a little more time (we have some performance issues, that might be due to either mono or the graphics driver - or both :)).

Johan is actually a key person to work on Linux support :)

Anonymous said...

Hello, I'm Norman from 3Di. Great to hear your interest in our viewer. Please feel free to join our mailing lists (information on the home page at 3di-rei.org) with any questions or comments you might have.