I had initially posted this on another site, but I felt that you all needed to hear this warning as well. This is a review for a product called Exit Reality. It's not technically a game, but more like a Second Life-ish extension of your web browser. If you can imagine that being fun and exciting, please read on and let me crush your dreams. Below is, verbatim, my review:

Exit Reality, a product recently released by the company of the same name, is attempting to reinvent the way you view the web by rendering all web sites in 3D. Here's an ambitious quote from Danny Stefanic, the founder: "It is the entire web in 3D -- making 40 billion virtual worlds -- and it will instantly transform 2D content into 3D." It appears as though Exit Reality wishes to be the spiritual successor to VRML. For anyone that knows what VRML is, you can already see where this is going. For others, here's a quick history lesson.

The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) was created during the mid-90s ('94 to be exact), at a time when every chucklehead out there was trying to get a piece of the web pie. Without getting into too much detail, the concept was relatively simple. Via a markup language, VRML writers could piece together 3D polygons and display them on a web browser, the theory being your web browser would now become a window to a 3D internet. Sadly, due to the limited power of home computers at the time, plus the fact that VRML was a crap language, the 3D internet revolution failed completely. Loading VRML websites slowed your computer to a crawl, and once the scene was displayed any movement whatsoever would cause another mind-numbingly slow render. VRML was littered with bugs as well, the source of countless browser failures and system crashes. By the late 90s, VRML was dead.

Fast forward to 2008 and the release of Exit Reality. While not an exact replica of VRML, the goal of Exit Reality is shockingly similar to it: Render the web in 3D. Exit Reality doesn't just stop there though, it also throws in industry buzzwords like social networking and Second Life-esque avatar systems. Essentially, the browser plug-in is just throwing whatever's popular right now in the internet and mashing it all together into some kind of Frankenapp (and scary it is). Interestingly enough, Exit Reality was conceived right around the time VRML was confusing the shit out of web users everywhere. The press release for Exit Reality states, "The 3D web concept was first conceived by Mr Stefanic 13 years ago and the team has been working steadily towards the launch since." O RLY? Thirteen years of development is a long time for anything. Methinks Danny is exaggerating a wee bit here. Let's peer into Danny's development process for the past decade+:

Danny, 1995: This VRML idea is cool. Too bad it sucks. I'll try and think of something new and better!

Danny, 2002: I still ain't got shit.

Danny, 2003: Hey this Second Life thing is great. It's like I can socialize with people in a virtual environment, but if I get bored, there's enough digital sex to power a small island.

Danny, 2004: This social networking stuff is really hitting off. It's great to connect with people, and also to e-stalk them.

Danny, 2007, after 12 bong hits and half a bag of Funyuns: Dude, I finally got it. What if we made something where you can browse the web with avatars and social networking features... But it was all in threeeeeeee deeeeeeeee.

And thus, Exit Reality was born. Originally I was just going to post something lambasting the product for being such an awful idea, but for the sake of journalistic integrity I felt it was important to actually try it out first before I took a text crap all over it. I'm glad I did, because everything I expected out of the plug-in came true. It is, quite possibly, the worst thing to hit the internet since Cakefarts.

Let me paint the picture for you. I downloaded and installed the plug-in, which weighs in at a brisk 3.5 MBs. Thankfully, it does not immediately convert your entire browser, but rather you launch an Exit Reality shortcut off your desktop. I double click, the browser takes about 15 seconds to launch, and I am immediately met with four straight critical exceptions. Nice. By the power of Greyskull I'm able to avoid a complete browser crash and Exit Reality starts to render my homepage, which happens to be MSN. Things start to pop into view like a crappy video game from the 90s. There's my default avatar, looking like a complete douchebag, and I'm standing in a giant box that has just about nothing in it. To my right I can see a small 3D box with the MSN default page in it. So I think, "Okay, I've got to walk over there and scroll through it on that box. Not exactly 'rendering a web page in 3D' but it's something."

So I attempt to move my avatar over to the website to do some browsing. Huge mistake. The browser starts to chug, and frames are rendered at about 0.05 FPS. It's VRML all over again. After my avatar teleports over to the MSN box, I try to click a link on the page. Instead of loading the link inside that floating box, a new browser window opens and the default MSN page pops up in its standard, readable, 2D format. What the f--k? So at this point I'm thinking their definition of rendering the internet in 3D is just have some floating boxes that when you click on them you get to the website you want. It's like an extra hurdle just to get to a website. I can already tell this is bullshit.

However, I say to myself, "Maybe it just doesn't work with MSN." So I load up IGN instead. As Exit Reality magically teleports me to another giant empty box, I start to see pop-up dialogs in the distance, past the floating box'o'suck, each with a label like "Xbox 360" or "PS3". Being the sleuth I am, I must investigate. My avatar teleports through 3 frames to the popups, and then I see it... IGN is rendered on the FLOOR. The whole main page, just chilling there on the floor, with pop-up dialogs representing all the links you can click on. So, in order to read an article, you've got to WALK BACKWARDS all the way down the page to read. Because I feel like this concept may be hard to grasp, allow me to use a visual aid:

The best analogy I can give for how Exit Reality renders a website in 3D is this: Imagine one of the dance clubs in Second Life. Make the dance floor a web page. Now, remove all the music, people, and anything else that could possibly be interesting. Congratulations, you've got yourself a web plug-in. So, I already think this thing is a piece of crap, but it does me one better. It says, "Haha, you don't like me? Well f--k you Oni!" and crashes my computer. That's right, it CRASHES my computer through a web browser. The only other time this has happened to me is, you guessed it, when I loaded a VRML page.

Now, I don't have anything against people putting out asinine software. Hey, if you can make a buck out of it, why not? The issue I have is that this Exit Reality product is being billed as a revolution of the internet. I'm sure there are some practical applications for the technology, but for the most part it's a complete gimmick. You can render web pages in 3D all you want, but the fundamental flaw is that you're still viewing and interacting with that render through a two-dimesional portal. Calling this revolutionary is like me taking a crap on a canvas and calling it a revolution of modern art. Just like my poopy painting, people will recognize Exit Reality for what it is: shit.