3Di OpenViewer: access Opensim worlds from your browser

One of the major inconveniences that are precluding the adoption of Opensim (and Second Life) based virtual world technology has been the impossibility to visit these virtual worlds using the browser. People are used to seeing everything inside a browser, and are even willing, in some cases, to download a plugin, but in general get discouraged when they have to download a whole new client, learn a new and complicated interface, etc.

That's why I got very excited when I found a reference, in Jeanricard Broek's blog, to a new release of 3Di's viewer-in-the-browser plugin, called  3Di OpenViewer. I googled for "3Di OpenViewer", and I found a fantastic tutorial by Zaki; in some minutes, I was running the viewer inside Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, and I was logging in to my own grid, Condensation Land!

In this post I'll explain what I did to get the viewer running, some (very minor) difficulties I experienced, and I'll also comment about the present and future features and the possibilities of the technology.

Downloading and customizing the plugins and the test code

1. Go to http://3di-opensim.com/openviewer/ and press the orange download button (alternatively, you can download it from here). You'll get a file called "TestPackage.zip".
2. Unzip it as a folder under the root directory of one of your disks  (I didn't do that at first, and I could not get the plugin running -- as it often happens, the program gets confused when there are non-ascii characters in the path).
3. Open the unzipped folder. You'll find several files; in particular, "3Di_OpenViewer_Setup_IE.exe", the plugin installer for IE, and "3Di_OpenViewer_Setup_Firefox.exe", the Firefox installer. Install the plugins -- they are in Japanese, but installation is straightforward anyway. If you get lost, refer to Zaki's excellent tutorial for details.
4. In the same folder, you'll find a file called "install.js". Open it with a text editor (notepad does the job). You'll find in lines 20-25 a number of assignments for the "setting" variable. Set setting["Locale"] = "en" -- this will change the interface language from Japanese to english, which is very convenient.
5. You can also change the server URI and the default avatar first name, last name and password if you wish.

Testing the viewer

Now we are ready to test the viewer. Open the "index.html" file you'll find in the TestPackage folder using either IE or Firefox. If you're using Internet Explorer, the browser may warn you that the page might be attempting to run malicious scripts; please unblock the page, or the viewer won't run. You'll be presented with a login screen similar to that one:

You'll have to specify the URI of your destination grid, your avatar first and last name, and your password, and then press the "login" button. The login box will dissapear, and you'll see a progress bar under the 3Di logo. After some few second, you'll be logged in:

You'll be able to navigate with your mouse, and also using the arrow keys of your keyboard, but unfortunately you'll see yourself as a gas ball, and the prims won't get textured (i.e., they'll be all white). This is a limitation of the current version of the viewer. To quote Zaki's tutorial,  "You can definitely log in to OpenSim grids with the current release version and prims will display. However textures and the avatar will not currently appear. The reason for this is that assets are not downloaded through the region server. We are working on a fully compatible version that we will release in the future, but for the moment to get the full experience, unfortunately you will have to connect to 3Di’s servers. We are also preparing more demo servers, but I have to ask for just a little more patience on that.", so that at the moment you can only get a full experience if you're using one of their servers. That's not bad, and anyway they are promising to release a "fully compatible version".

The viewer's interface is minimalistic (which is a good thing in my opinion, if the purpose of such a viewer is to attract new people to virtual worlds): navigation is straightforward; there is also a small toolbox that only appears when the mouse is over the top right corner of the viewer; from where you can get access to a small number of tools and settings: a small "teleport" dialog, a minimal IM chat interface, a small settings dialog, and a close button.

Good things to come

Overall, the viewer gave me a very good impression, even if in its current incarnation it is still little little more than a prototype, at least to access Opensim-based worlds. Each plugin weights only 10.5 MB, which is a good thing, and the installation is straightforward (altho they should fix the bug when the test page's path contains special characters). Log in and log out is very smooth, altho navigation seemed a little jerky (FRAPS was reporting 30 fps tho).

But the strongest points of this viewer are what its makers, 3Di, are promising: the viewer will be "fully compatible" with Opensim soon (see Zaki's quote above), the viewer code can be made independent of the browser, and, above all, the viewer will be released as open source. This is extremely important, because this is a viewer that does not have a single line of Linden Lab code [Update 20090101: indeed it is partially based on the OpenSimulator Forge project Idealist Viewer], and the current licensing mess (the LL viewer is GPL and Opensim is BSD, so that Opensim developers cannot look at the code for the viewer) can be completely avoided, which means faster development, the possibility of quickly prototyping viewer mods to go with new server features, etc.