Red Interactive Agency, an internet website designing company, has seen the future and it's a whole new level of interactivity on the web.
On their little test site you're a randomly generated avatar with a generic username. From there, if you wish, you're able to choose an avatar of your choice as well as a username and your location. After all that, you can roam the site as you please. There is also a small chat window for you to talk to your fellow wanderers.
The true interactive fun is with the special keys that do other things. The home key makes your avatar do a little jig, and different avatars do different jigs. Press the up arrow key and you take off like a bat out of hell! Press the combo control along with shift and you break combo punches on nearby faces. Hold down the shift key while walking for a boost of speed, and page up/down to strafe up and down on the path. There are also built-in profanity filters to encourage others to be a bit more polite.
This level of interactivity could make visiting your usual sites much more fun. Just imaging flying around a tiny world, viewing pages within a site's structure!
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-30-2007 @ 8:19AM
Kes said...
A truly interesting idea. While I do like the idea of website interactivity taken to the next level, my concern is (as always) those you will be interacting with in the environment. If MMOs are any indication, some people frequent interactive places just to screw with others. Though in this case that seems to be a more limited issue: there is only so much you can do.
That aside, watching (and joining) a dozen random characters dancing on a page, for no apparent reason, is weirdly fun.
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3-30-2007 @ 9:39AM
Chris Gilmer said...
I think Google should be the first mainstream company to adapt this technology to searching methods!
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3-30-2007 @ 12:47PM
Matt Leach said...
Though the actual moving around and animation seems somewhat of a novelty, the ability to talk to people viewing the same site as you will prove a truly invaluable tool. I'd love to be able to ask for further information from other viewers about the particular information I am viewing. I have often wondered why more sites don't have some kind of "chat room" integrated. I can think of little reason for a site not to do this. Imagine talking in real time with people on Amazon, Wikipedia, Engadget(mobile)Downloadsquad etc. I can think of no more valuable feature for Web 3.0 more truly in line with the purpose of the internet: to share knowledge.
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3-30-2007 @ 5:07PM
Andrew Fong said...
Clever ... but I feel that for those of us who just want to go to a site, do something (e.g. buy a movie ticket), and leave, the dancing avatar would get annoying after a while. Being able to chat with other users is definitely a huge plus however and something I hope becomes more commonplace. The thing is, chatrooms aren't exactly new technology.
In China for instance, once of the reasons Baidu is trouncing Google is that they offer chatrooms or forums for every search term, allowing users searching for the same thing to talk to one another.
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4-11-2007 @ 4:25PM
Adora said...
Web 3.0 hasn't been clearly defined yet, but there is a consensus emerging that it will be the "semantic web" that can be understood and interpreted by computers. This site's cute, but it's as revolutionary as Microsoft Bob. =]
:: Lisa
:: adora [at] techslut [.] net
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