Browse the web together in realXtend
Collaborative web browsing plays an important role in meetings. Meeting rooms have usually data projectors so that people can plug in their laptops and show slides, documents and web pages to support their message in a meeting.
In realXtend 0.4 it is possible to show web pages with live flash content, like a Youtube video (see CTN article about that). The web page to show is defined in the texture properties as a media URL.
However, it is a bit clumsy to use texture properties to change the web page when there are lot of people attending a meeting and possibly wanting to share something.
CTN built a server side solution to the problem using PHP and javascript.
Follow these steps to test the solution:
- download php and html files (unzip webscreen.zip) and upload them to your web server (if you don’t have a web server, get a free hosting from http://www.000webhost.com/. For professional use CTN recommends http://www.hosting24.com.)
- set texture’s media URL to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webscreen/webscreen.html (use your own server name here!) and apply the texture to a cube
- open a browser window to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webscreen/seturl.php (use your own server name here)
- write a URL (e.g. http://www.realxtend.org) to the text input field and press enter, after a few seconds, the web page shows in realXtend viewer, and the same web page is shown to all participants in the virtual world at the same time.
Extra benefit of this approach is that people who do not have realXtend can also follow the presentation from the same URL using a standard browser (you can test it by using the CTN URLs in the steps above).
If you wish to have several webscreens showing different content, it is easy to copy the same web files to another folder at the web server to separate URLs. To develop the solution further, learn the tricks from this book.
The next topic will be about how to share your Powerpoint slides in realXtend – stay tuned!
In Second Life, this can be achieved by changing the parcel media URL through scripting, so for example my screen allows URLs to be entered in chat and updates accordingly. I assume such scripting capability is currently not there in realXtend?
I have seen media URL changing done using Python scripting in realXtend. I suspect that the LSL approach does not work, because in realXtend, there is a media URL for every texture, not only per parcel. LSL itself is supported in realXtend.
My bigger goal is to have a web interface to interact with many aspects of a virtual world, so that
- it is possible to easily bring all the functionality to any realXtend world
- it is possible to join a meeting or event also by using only a web browser, this may be an important factor for companies considering to use realXtend as a meeting tool.
I will continue to write articles where I solve technical enablers for a complete meeting tool which is acceptable for RL business use.