I can only imagine the type of websites that could be created if Unity web plugin was as cherished as Flash.
Does anyone know of any website inferfaces built with Unity
How does UT encourage the net audience to download their web plugin - other than for game play?
I f*cking hate flash websites, the thought of unity websites almost makes me puke.
I’m working on a website which has a very large Unity webplayer area which will show at the top of every page, covering probably 75% of the visible area. I plan to show various presentations/games/whatever, but also I’m looking into ways to integrate with the web page using javascript.
Originally I was just sort of thinking to use Unity webplayer as a way to get a typical off-line user experience to happen inside the web browser, but now I am getting a lot more ideas and inspiration about what could really be possible in this exciting new frontier.
For example I plan to implement extended forms of navigation which work in 3D and thus can be animated and made more intuitive. The company logo will probably be embedded within the Unity player and thus animatable with all the 3D bells and whistles. Maybe some on-screen controls also to leverage various customization options.
I am even considering putting the shopping kart inside the Unity player (except perhaps the final checkout part which has to be on its own secure page), as well as eventually having an entirely 3D store where you can move through a 3D environment looking for digital products, maybe even make a bit of a game out of the shopping experience.
Flash has already made a lot of inroads into using 2d vector graphics and 3d animation for various web elements, like image galleries for example. There is really just about no limit to what you could do with Unity.
There is no reason why you cant implement an entire website inside Unity. However, one of the significant drawbacks is that search engines and anyone else wanting to set up linking to your site are going to be completely shut out if the page only has a webplayer on it. That’s why I’m using Unity for the major graphics presentation and some interface/3d elements, and then following it below with traditional website technologies, the usual text, images, forms, javascript stuff, etc.
At this point in time it would be suicide from a search engine ranking point of view to have only the webplayer for your entire site. You also have to keep in mind the possibility of the webplayer either not working, not being supported on the platform (e.g. Linux etc), the user not wanting to install it or upgrade it, and possibly having to have a standard web-technologies website behind the Unity content so that those people will still be able to use your site and access your products.
What it boils down to is, it isn’t what tool you use but what you do with it. I’ve seen horrible annoying flash, sites with only flash that take way too long to load (major problem), and sites which are just very poor quality. But there are also flash sites which are really interesting and cool and well implemented, and make you go wow.
A bit harsh, but I tend to agree. Waiting for a bloated flash website to load when all I am looking for is some quick information is very annoying.
I only like them on movies websites…
Also, I believe there was a topic about this awhile back. I think it was noted that it couldn’t happen because the Unity3d plugin atm has a smaller audience.
I was actually busy creating an entire website inside of Unity. Separate sections of the site won’t be placed under headings in a menu bar, but instead will have a floating futuristic bluish glass pane with some fancy buttons and lights and stuff placed somewhere in the 3D scene.
I got so far as to place the various sections in their various locations, building the backdrops etc and even had some characters moving in the background just to drive home the idea that this is 3d space and not just some flat website…
Then I hit the major stumbling block… Each time I wanted to load a webpage into my glass pane… How would I do that? Would I have to limit my presentations to using the TextArea ? But that too isn’t in 3D. 3DText? Making that scrollable and appear and vanish within a border…!!! Perhaps create all my pages in Photoshop and just load an image each time they want to look at a page? One laaaaaaaaaarge image for each page… Hmmm…
Then came the forums and feedback areas… How to show an avatar and text within a scrollable area inside a 3D space? Hmmm…
I was left without a way to figure this out. The only solution would be to build the entire page including all blogs and feedback etc at home and update the project file each time I make the slightest of changes… 40Mb upload because I realized I made a spelling mistake. 40Mb upload because Iw ant to add a “Coming soon” section. 40Mb upload because I want to replace the coming soon with the actual section. 40Mb upload because I received a comment…
Of course, there is the option of using php to turn the text into an image and return that image to the game, but firstly, I don’t know php that well and secondly, I still don’t know how to create a scrollable 3D region…
So I decided that building a 3D website to showcase your work in a portfolio style is very doable, but interactive websites in the sense of the word “website”, not yet…
…but bru… if you only knew what I am busy with right this very minute… He he he… Interactive website my arse! If I can pull this off… my website will take AGES to navigate but I don’t think anyone will mind… 
Oh, and on a “p.s.” for people trying to get every person on the internet to go to their site I would have to agree with this but in my case, my website is targeted towards unity users, family and friends. Since it is focussing on people with the plugin installed and people I know will install it, I have no reason to be worried about loosing visitors…
I think this is also a point worth considering…
Good point.
I think there is something to be said for targetting the narrower audience who might be more interested in installing or having installed the Unity webplayer.
I think though that you should still think of people who are outside the scope of your site, how to attract them to build business, otherwise how are you going to expand? For me I don’t expect many visitors to have the plugin installed and so am either going to try to play up the benefits of installing it, and making it quick and easy, or providing a fallback of normal html content.
The issues that you had with making an entire site inside Unity, don’t sound insurmountable. Maybe you just couldn’t figure it out but I don’t see why it’s not possible, given that both Windows and OSX now have fully hardware accelerated desktops running inside a 3D environment, and thus your browser is already a 3D app inside it. You could either render the whole page into an image and upload it, or several images, or more likely a kind of print on demand where you only render the part of the page which is coming into view. You can easily get a page to crop by changing the UV coordinates procedurally.
As to how to modify parts of the site without reuploading the entire player, you should use the WWW class to download page content from inside the player, keeping it more modular, rather than storing the entire site inside the player.
I do agree that long load times are a BIG no-no for a Unity-based website. You have to have very fast loading, procedural content, etc, and you can’t throw in lots of images just because you want to. The user can’t be kept waiting more than 2-3 seconds before they see useful content. Some of the flash sites keep you waiting for a minute or more (as do many Unity webplayers) which is totally unacceptable for a potentially paying customer.
And that is exactly the problem I was facing… making Images with READABLE text means making large images. Large images take time to load. Loading text via the WWW class (which was originally my idea) … to be more precise… I wantedto create web pages and load that in complete with formatting of images, fonts etc etc etc and display that on my 3d object…
Getting text via WWW is easy… Manually parsing HTML not so much…
Well you don’t have to download html pages as such. Just download the individual images, the text, and a little bit of meta information about where to position them. Then you just need to render the text to the images and paste your individual images into them. Downloading the page as a whole pre-rendered image is not a good idea, like you say the image has to be big, high-res, and will take too long to load.
Come again?
Well you need to create a texture with Texture2D(), and then you need to actually draw the pixels representing the font of the image, based on the text you downloaded. So you go through the text one character at a time, depending on which character it is you read a block of pixels from an array of font images (or maybe using like a spritesheet), and copy those pixels into the texture (or use SetPixels perhaps). Then you Apply() to upload the texture to the video card and then you can use it in the material of a piece of flat geometry.
There’s a couple people working out 3d web in other places. Here’s a real cool youtube demo about Navi library and Awesomium:
And there’s a guy over at maxforums.org working on his own. Here’s the thread for that:
you can interact with the web pages in the normal way (click, click drag) right in the 3d space.
Looks pretty cool!
Pretty neat… although one thinks that if you’re going 3D, why take something which is primarily a 2D interface and put it into a perspective projection? Surely 3D can give us more possibilities than that?
Quit calling me Shirley! You’re not even REAL!!!
My opinion: 2D is for reading and3D will never be 2D…
This was exactly what I was looking for but in Unity. If we could somehow do this and like the guy said, use it as a texture for any object then the issue would be us giving people a place to click to center the camera in a position that would give near-as-possible 2D appearance of the object in question.
For example, imagine a museum with a slightly concave piece hanging on the wall (like the image above) you can walk though the museum and investigate whatever, but when you click on the piece, the camera zooms to right in front of it and stops at a height and angle that makes the text appear a flat as possible for the model it is on…
I would have loved to have this ability inside Unity… Imagine for a second… instead of having the game send commands to the web page, it could actually just do whatever and show the pages inside of the app itself… No more need for app to page and page back to app coding… Plus… like we are all envisioning already… we could make some wickedly cool apps with this functionality… 
Well what it boils down to is that if you have a Unity webplayer on your page, you can do anything you like inside of it. If it’s a game running in the webplayer, then effectively the game menus and title screen and game level selectors and the game itself etc are all the website.
I love books, which are 3D objects. Even a piece of paper is really a 3D object. When I pick up book or a piece of paper to read it, the rest of the world does not become flat. 2 dimensional coordinate systems are useful for some things, but all our experience, including reading, happens in 3 (or rather, 4) dimensions. The web as it has evolved thus far has created expectations about interacting with 2D content (i.e. text, pictures, movies) to which we are no longer bound, and that is a huge opportunity. In a web page, for example, horizontal scrolling is annoyingly bad design, but on a touch device, it’s the normative behavior. Working on an ebook for ipad, I started to realize that you don’t have to just turn pages from horizontally, but you can go up and down, or diagonally, or through the z index. And the space between pages can contain content as well.
Rendering traditional web pages inside of a 3D environment isn’t that exciting to me - I want worlds where every tree is a text, every stone is a picture, every flower is a movie.
@ImaginaryHuman - I see it’s harvest time at the hair farm! it’ll grow back
cool i am building a city maybe i can help
take a look,I was think about a 3d forum inside a world, this is my aug 10 render http://solidfiles.com/d/b813/
working on relaying the roads and building a park
(sept 15 render test) http://solidfiles.com/d/94a2/
