You wait years for a virtual world viewer in the browser then suddenly they are everywhere. There has been a raft of browser-based 3D environment announcements over the past couple of weeks. Second Life trialled their cloud-rendering viewer, allowing you to drop into selected SL locations just using your browser and a suitably high speed net connection. Rezzable have been teasing the Web and LinkedIn communities with a 'coming very soon' browser-based viewer for OpenSim based on Unity 3D. Former Linden Lab employee Chris Collins company Tipodean Technologies made a similar announcement of their Canvas viewer for Second Life and OpenSim (licensed from IBM) again based on Unity 3D. The high fidelity virtual environments of Blue Mars, such as the business focussed virtual district of OnLand, will soon be available in a browser using server-side rendering and streaming. VastPark are also known to have done some work on a WebGL-based viewer for their virtual environments. Probably most impressive of all was the appearance two days ago of KataSpace built on the Sirikata virtual world server, using WebGL and requiring no plugins or downloads at all for cutting edge browsers.    more »