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Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs

Is that Vista in your Browser?

By Jon Peddie

3D software developers have long held the dream of applying the third dimension to the Internet, which is the most comprehensive communications network that humanity has invented to date. This is the vision of a literal “Web3D” rather than simply 3D on the web—a vision which has now become reality according to SpaceTime. From now on, users can search and browse the Internet using SpaceTime’s new paradigm where information need not only be recovered, but discovered.

SpaceTime claims it will save time in searching because multiple search results are displayed in their patent pending 3D Visual Stacks. All search results are cataloged in a continuous timeline as well. Regardless of your search preference—Ebay, Google, Yahoo!, Flickr, images—SpaceTime provides a consistent 3D visual interface to them all, with many more services to come.

The creator of the company and architect of the design, Eddie Bakhash, was a successful entrepreneur who started American Pearl, an online retailer based in the Diamond District of New York, and approached this project as a vehicle to make on-line shopping easier. (BTW—if you have any interest in or curiosity about, pearls, check out the site, http://www.americanpearl.com/.) And if you want to read a bit about the Eddie go here: http://www.americanpearl.com/ourstaff.html

His original idea was to help consumers make on-line purchases easier, more informative (as in being to see all of the product), and in general a pleasurable experience. Initially, SpaceTime has signed up with eBay. However, Amazon, and YouTube will also be key sites in the browser.

We’ve been testing this new browser using a pre-beta copy, and it is indeed attractive, novel, and even fun to use—but, oh there’s always a but—but, it’s real 3D and, as such it needs good, way above average graphics. All you two-year old IGPs can leave now, there’s nothing here for you. Go on, shoo, and take those loser Dx7 and 8 AIBs with you.

On the initial install, it informed me that my128MB of video memory (in my laptop) is the minimum and therefore operation may be slow. That was accurate and I found it to be a tremendous resource user, never getting below 30% and averaging about 50% It does drop to 0% if you go on to other apps, but hangs on to the 99MB it takes at run time. This sounds worse than it is, and it’s not too uncommon. Also, if you don’t run it in full screen and make it a smaller window instead, it’s quite well behaved even on a frame-buffer memory challenged system like mine.

At rest with just Word open, my system was using 870 MB, and the CPU was averaging about six percent usage. After loading SpaceTime, that went to 20% average CPU utilization.

However, on Darth Vader (see above, two, dual core AMD Athlon 64 FX 74 processors, and 4GB of RAM, dual GeForce 8800GTXs) it didn’t even wiggle the Task Manager. So once again, this is not something for lightweight (talking horsepower here, not kilos) machines like my two-year-old laptop even if it is a DirectX 9 machine.

OK, but what does it do?

It is a tabbed web browser that stacks up reduced versions of web pages you’ve visited in an infinity style, as illustrated in the following picture.

Figure 1. SpaceTime 3D browser with stacked web pages. (Source: JPR)

You can roll through these pages with your mouse wheel, and double click on anyone visible to bring it up to full size. When you go full size, a button appears in the tool bar in the upper right corner labeled, “Go Back,” and pressing it takes you back to multi-page view.

The screens or windows (web pages) stack up in the order you loaded them, so the 3D view is also a time record.

To get the search function to work, (to search for words within a web page) you first have to select the search engine you want, which is done by clicking on the center button at the top. (Current choices are Yahoo, Google, eBay, YouTube, and Amazon.) When you do a Google or Yahoo search, SpaceTime highlights (in yellow) the keywords on the actual web pages where the words appear.

Here is perhaps the second best feature: just click Ctrl-N and a nifty and useful on-screen navigator appears to assist you in (a) zooming in, (b) zooming out, (c) panning a page and (d) shuffling between pages. Increase your SpaceTime productivity by finding information rapidly. To hide the Navigator, just click Ctrl-N again.

Figure 2. SpaceTime’s navigator and image viewer (Source: JPR)

If you do a Google Image Search and double click the image, SpaceTime will create a new page showing you where your image originated from the worldwide web. This is not currently available for Yahoo, but it’s coming soon.

However, when you go to pages that require a password, there isn’t any link to your password memory file, and there’s no invitation to remember your passwords as you enter them. Also there’s no action indicator, so when you click on something in a web page, you don’t get any feedback that the click worked (like the spinning disk in IE.) And there is no popup blocker.

However, what features are functional work smoothly and the missing ones are not handicaps. For me, they’re nice but not essential.

It’s still early days for this browser, and so the things we discovered (plus if you’d like to see what others who have tried it think, check out: http://www.spacetime3d.com/community/forumdisplay.php?f=2) may be corrected by the time you check it out, or maybe next rev. Like I said, it’s a beta.

There’s a really nice demo on their web site: http://www.spacetime.com/home.php. It takes a while to load but it’s worth the wait. I can pretty much guarantee if you watch it you’re going to want to down load the software.

What do we think?

3D on the web is problematic, it requires high bandwidth if the site itself is trying to portray 3D models, and the client has to have a powerful 3D engine. The problem with the past attempts to deliver 3D via the web have been the complexity of the models, the difficulty in the controls, especially if it was a 6-axis model, and the reluctance of the developers to admit that it took a lot of horsepower to work—they wanted it to be universal and run on any machine. SpaceTime has been a bit more enlightened about it all. Not promising to deliver 3D from a web site, and not saying any PC can run the browser. Time is on their side as the installed base of machines improves. And the prime candidates for using this browser are people who want to buy things, i.e., they have money, and therefore usually have good machines. We give it and the company a solid thumbs up.

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