Tuesday, November 24, 2009

When will we see HTML on a Prim?

I am as guilty as everyone of reporting the news, watching the blogshere and then not returning or posting about developments after the initial flash of interest. What happens is that we get a very fragmented view of the State of the Art. So today I will revisit something that has been on and off the radar for 4 years...

HTML on a prim, Awesomium , Sirikata, Solipsis & the LLMedia API

History:
The flip side of the coin is 3D in the browser
Take a look at these videos, now 6 months old.

Sirikata



Solipsis



Quote below is from The Linden Lab Wiki

Will media rendering plugins be incorporated into the Second Life Viewer in the future?

There are no plans to build media rendering plugins back into the main codebase for the Second Life Viewer at this time. In fact, just the opposite is happening. Linden Lab is migrating the current media rendering engines out of the Second Life Viewer code, and making them into separate media rendering plugin libraries.

Linden Lab will continue to ship the existing media rendering plugins with the installer for the Second Life desktop application, making it easy for users to get the basic complement of media rendering engines on first installation of the Viewer. However, there are exceptions, like the Apple QuickTime player, which the end-user download and install prior to installing the Second Life Viewer.

For new media rendering plugins, Linden Lab is considering bundling them into the installer for first-time installations of the Second Life Viewer AND providing independent downloads for easy update of previously downloaded Viewers.

If you are developing a media rendering plugin, and would like it to ship with the Second Life installer, please contact Linden Lab at sldev@lindenlab.com.

Will Linden Lab create an "app store" for these plugins?

At this time, Linden Lab is not providing an app store for media rendering plugins.

This release is simply a way to get developers engaged in using the media API and creating interesting media rendering plugins for the Second Life Viewer.

Linden Lab will be monitoring demand for a unified catalog of media rendering plugins, and may choose to provide such a service in the future.


https://svn.secondlife.com/svn/linden/branches/2009/plugin-api/indra/media_plugins/awesomium/

When will we ever get 2D and 3D together? Can "The Lab"create plugins only for SL Enterprise to add value, justify the $55,000 price tag? Have they already? Comments welcome. :-)
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1 comments:

  1. Thank you for a great writeup. It is a topic that I am hugely interested in. As you point out above we integrated Awsomium into Sirikata and learned a lot from that when we did our first couple of projects on the platform. This has lead us to believe that embedding a browser into our system is more important than ever. Originally we thought that HTML on a prim was what we got (which is pretty important by itself) but it turns out that you also get a great interface engine that really benefits from the recent advances in javascript.

    We were basically pretty happy with Chrome and the V8 Javascript and Webkit libraries we get with that but did feel that we could do a better job of integrating this into our system. So some months back we started a complete rewrite of the embedded browser. We are pretty proud of the results which are now really starting to feel robust. We have code named it Berkelium and it lives here: http://github.com/sirikata/berkelium. It is available as a separate library under a BSD license so anyone who wanted to embed a browser should feel free to use it and we hope that many will.

    The rewrite also meant that Sirikata and web browser integration have been a little silent since the video you link to above. But with the rewrite complete we are ready to move ahead on this front again so stay tuned :)

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