Introduction

Media on a prim was implemented in OpenSimulator as of 0.7.1. This facility allows you to display and navigate web pages from the surface/texture of a prim.

Architecture

Like voice, media on a prim is largely implemented as a direction connection from a prim surface configured for MOAP directly to a website. It looks a little like this.

1. The viewer starts by requesting media on a prim information (ObjectMediaRequest HTTP capability message) for a particular prim (here with ID 123) from OpenSimulator.
2. OpenSimulator responds with an ObjectMediaResponse with the shared media information for each face. Here, face 0 is currently pointing at www.google.com
3. The viewer fetches this page directly from google.com and all subsequent interactions with that website go directly to it. OpenSimulator is not involved in any further data exchanges, unless the viewer changes the page URL (in which case that goes back to OpenSimulator and is sent out to any other viewers that are interested in that prim.

This is why you can see people changing webpages on these surfaces but you can't see their interactions with that particular page unless the website itself takes steps to mirror it to all browsers pointing at that page. For instance, each viewer can play a movie on a YouTube page that a MOAP surface points to but they are all playing that movie independently. If one user pauses the movie this won't be seen by any other viewer.

Limits

Media on a prim is quite heavyweight. Viewers will very probably place a limit on the number of MOAP surfaces that can be shown at once. Typically, the current limit is 5 surfaces.

References

• For instructions on how to set up MOAP surfaces in a viewer, see Media on a prim/Shared Media