A Quick Peek at Exit Reality
I have been playing with Exit Reality for a couple of months, but I’d thought I’d wait to review it until some of the more serious bugs were worked out of it, which they have been. This is still a beta product and still has lots of annoying bugs, but it now qualifies as “useable” at least, assuming you are using IE7 or FF2 (FF3 still not working yet).
Despite the stupid name, Exit Reality is based on three really cool ideas for the 3D web, unfortunately they add up to a fatal flaw I will get to soon. First, I want to describe these three really cool ideas:
Cool idea #1: Give people who are visiting the same website the ability to chat with one another. This idea has been around a while. I found similar 2D programs like weblin which do the same thing.
Cool idea #2: Do everything in VRML (aka X3D).
Why? First of all, it has been around for years, and thus you have tons of instant content to bring to your program. Exit Reality is essentially a 3D chat program built on top of a VRML viewer. Many early 3D virtual worlds, like Cybertown, were built in VRML. Keeping with the standard means that user created content definitely has a place in Exit Reality, assuming you know how to build stuff in VRML.
Cool idea #3: Create a handy “2D website to 3D VRML website” converter, so you can surf the whole internet in 3D if you want. Now the results of such
an ambitious undertaking, will obviously not be perfect because the vast majority of the web was designed to be viewed in 2D not 3D. But the Exit Reality people have thought of that and created special templates for some of the more popular social websites.
For example, going to my My Space Page in Exit reality brings up a nice studio apartment with my picture on the wall, and doors leading to some of my friends “apartments”. I also have the ability to move the 3D furniture around, though other visitors can come in and move the furniture around for me.
So these three ideas add up to a pretty cool concept.
Here’s the fatal flaw: 3D avatars built in VRML, have always, and probably will always, suck! Avatar animations are low rez and goofy looking, this is because VRML was never designed for human like avatars, and the ones that exist are the result of hacks that were not designed to use bvh animations, or in general live up to standards set by other 3D chat programs.
Exit Reality has yet to prove me wrong, and in fact the avatar system currently in place is where a lot of the most annoying bugs exist. The default avatar is what I call “boring doofus guy” with dark gray pants and a light gray shirt. There is an avatar selection tool and the list of avatars is large, but everytime you open up the list it does not remember where you were last time you opened it, and starts from the beginning. Everytime you open Exit Reality you default to boring doofus guy, and when you switch to other 3D pages, you run a 50-50 chance of reverting back to boring doofus guy. The pictures above used the “Candace” avatar, which starting with a “C” is not too far down the list of avatars in the alphabetically sorted list.
The cheesy avatar problem cannot be overlooked unfortunately. All avatar
based chat programs need cool customized avatars. Their avatar is their identity. Selecting from a list of lame ones won’t cut it for very long.
Kudo’s to Exit Reality for a cool idea in 3D web surfing, and as a side bonus, providing a top notched X3D viewer plug in, but the 3D chat side of this program will largely be ignored due to the crappy VRML support of avatars.
