As I’ve announced at OSCC’14, I am working with Liru on a Singularity-based viewer whose main goal is to make the viewer’s UI as programmable as possible server-side. You know, more like Web browsers.
The idea here is to allow OpenSim operators to have more control over the experience that their users will have; specifically, I want to be able to design much simpler user interfaces that are more appropriate for people who have no experience with Second Life and/or may be even uncomfortable with seeing themselves as avatars. But more importantly that any specific UI, I want to be able to provide those UI specifications dynamically as the user enters the simulator, rather than being hard-coded during the viewer’s build process. This way, we can change the UI without forcing users to install new versions of the viewer. And no one needs to agree on any specific UI.
I’m happy to announce that the very first alpha release of OnLook is now available for testing! Without the server-side UI specs, OnLook behaves exactly like Singularity, so you won’t see any difference when you login to your world. In order to help people test it, I have deployed a small test world that can be accessed via the Hypergrid. So here is a description of the steps that you can do to test this, along with pictures of what you’ll see.