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E-Mail Turned Into a Video Game

by Terrence O'Brien on July 6, 2007 at 03:39 PM


Sometimes a program comes along that we can't quite grasp the purpose of. 3D Mailbox is one such program. It's made by Robert Savage, who previously released a program that visualizes Internet traffic as 3D avatars which disembark buses labeled 'Google' or 'Yahoo' or wherever your site's visitor originated from.

3D Mailbox has all the standard features you'd expect of a desktop e-mail program. The difference is that messages arrive as visitors to a Miami resort. The visitors wander about until you "read" them. The 'Sims' style visualization seems to be all but completely useless, a novel idea that serves no real productive purpose except to utilize the horsepower of your new fancy Core 2 Duo processor.

One feature we do enjoy though is the virtual bouncer who checks visitors before they enter. Real messages are let through the gate, while spam is literally fed to the sharks.

We promise you this is no joke. We were skeptical as well, especially given the campy trailer above which includes narration and a soundtrack straight from a blockbuster film trailer. But, we downloaded and installed it. It's far from a smooth experience and has hefty hardware requirements for an e-mail program (a reasonably new dedicated graphics card is required), but we can safely say this is for real.

From Red Ferret Journal

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Tags: 3d, 3d mailbox, 3dMailbox, email, sims

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