Technology introduced by Linden Lab a couple of months ago allowed residents for the first time to view web pages live within Second Life – however they could not click on any links to surf from one page to another. Daden Navigator now lets residents do this – surfing the web collectively in the same way that Daden's recent Google Maps viewer allowed residents to share Google Maps within the world.
Daden MD David Burden says “Daden Navigator provides all the functions that you expect to see in a normal web browser. It lets you set a home page or a bookmark, view bookmarks, and has back, refresh and search buttons. It is as close as you can currently get to a normal web browser in Second Life”.
To use the browser a resident just rezzes it onto the land they own. They can then use Second Life's text chat facility to browse the internet. Simply entering the url of the website in chat will automatically bring up the relevant page onto media screens within their SL space. To follow a link from that web page to another the user just “says” the name of the link, or some unique keywords from it. The new web page then loads.
Since the Daden Navigator uses Linden Lab's existing web page on a prim technology it inherits the same current limitations as that technology – you can't scroll through long pages, fill out forms or view active Javascript or Flash content. However Daden Navigator has a “popout” command which loads the view page automatically into the resident's own web browser in order to deal with difficult content.
Web sites require no special coding to work with Daden Navigator, however David says, “What we find interesting is that because Daden Navigator is based on technology that we originally developed for visually impaired users it suddenly makes Second Life residents acutely aware of web accessibility issues – if a web site is accessible it will work well with Daden Navigator, if it isn't then SL users, just like visually impaired users, will struggle.”
Daden Navigator is being sold both on Daden Prime inside of Second Life, and through established SL web based retailers such as SLExchange. The standard version of Daden Navigator is initially available for L$2400 (about £4), and a Pro version will follow shortly which will allow users to store bookmarks in notecards and to customize the configuration. Daden can also provide an Enterprise version to cope with corporate intranets.
David concluded, “Second Life is proving to be a great environment for serious business uses such as virtual meetings, collaboration, training and education. However even here users have been hampered by the inability to access ad-hoc web based content to support a meeting, training or learning session. Now users can be given instant access to almost any web content to support their use of Second Life – and share that web session with any other SL users wherever they may be in the real world.”
PHOTOS:
Photos are available for download from the Media/Image Library at www.daden.co.uk
LINKS:
http://slurl.com/
To purchase Daden Navigator at SL Exchange look under Gadgets/Information Management
http://www.slexchange.com/
