ExitReality

The latest buzz on the Internet - ExitReality allows you to explore the World Wide Web in 3D, but with a lot of pain...

The plus points

It allows you to browse the World Wide Web in 3D, something like browsing the Internet in Sim City. You can see the avatars of your friends in your own customisable virtual world. Websites will be shown in a different manner, e.g. Flickr becomes some sort of gallery, Youtube is shown as a cinema. Visually it's more interesting than the 2D browsing currently.

The bad points

Even with 2GB worth of RAM on board and a 20Mbps connection, the 3D virtual world is slow to load, even with only one tab, not to mention doing multiple tab browsing. It also caused my browsers to crash (both Firefox 3 and IE7). Despite having some visual advantage, browsing becomes a painfully slow process. I may be wrong on this, but ExitReality also makes IE it's default browser. Whenever I try to exit to 2D on Firefox, it launches IE instead. I've verified that the default browser on my PC is Firefox.

It's touted as the future of the web. But before we have more RAM and bandwidth, I don't see it going anywhere.