SpaceTime has released a new 3D browser that is definitely innovative, but I don’t see it being all that useful. It boasts the 3D search, 3D eBay searching, and 3D tabbed browsing which is something your friends would definitely be impressed with, but that doesn’t mean it is very usable.
It basically creates 3D stacks of either websites or images, and displays them in a fashion similar to a cascading effect. When you do a Google search, for example, it pulls up the website for each of the first 10 results for you to shuffle through. Sounds cool, right? And don’t get me wrong, it is very cool, except for the 10 to 20 seconds where you can’t use SpaceTime because it is retrieving and rendering the sites.
You can also search eBay items or images on the Web (Yahoo! images or Flickr) which is very well done. This is more usable than the Google searching because it pulls in the actual images and displays only those, instead of pulling in the entire website.
At anytime you can put a site or image into 2D mode for more sensible browsing by double-clicking on it. Then you can always get back into the 3D mode by clicking the "Go Back" button in the upper-right corner.
So who would use something like this? For the general consumer use I think it is far from practical, but I could see something like this popping up on kiosks in stores. Just think about it, you can shop by images, and then if you see something you like you just double-click on it and it will bring up the product page. It definitely has a niche market, but I’m confident that a typical person browsing the Web would not want to use this on a regular basis.
So what’s it like? Well, it’s not exactly something that can be explained using a bunch of screenshots, so I put together a video demonstration that shows what it’s like to browse the Web with SpaceTime:
Oh, and did I mention system resources? You need to have at least 512MB of memory, 128MB video card, and a 2.4GHz processor just to run this!
Download SpaceTime to try it for yourself, or visit their homepage. Let us know what you think in the comments below.
Source: Download Squad
well, i thought i’d check this out. i like showing off interesting things to the family. as far as regular browsing goes, not much point. but for ebay and photo searching…nice. i may keep it around just for the novelty IF (note the big if), i don’t have any more problems. it runs just fine. i have a 2.8 dual core, 2 gig ram, 256 meg pci express, 7mbit internet. but when i went to exit, it crashed….hard. i gave up hitting the ok button after about the 50th time and just rebooted my computer. i haven’t taken the time yet to refire but if i have any problems in the future, i’ll note it.
anyway, cool toy but definitely not a day to day usage tool.
thanks for the fun stuff and keep ‘em comin.
Glad you liked it, and I believe that it did crash for me one time when closing as well. I had closed it several times though and I know that it didn’t crash every time.