With the recent browser integration, E15 is now able to support custom user scripting. Because E15 has a Python interpreter at its core, page content can be searched, and browsing automated. As an example, we have integrated a spidering script into E15:In this example, a Python script directs the procedural traversal of a set of links originating from a single Flickr page. The end result is a space of pages that can then be visually explored. And if visual exploration is not enough, text-based filtering of results can reveal pages that would have otherwise been hard to find in a large set of pages:

When we give the E15 demo to sponsors here at the Media Lab, a question we’re often asked is whether or not the pages we’ve loaded are still “active”. Unfortunately, E15 was not built for this type of support. We’re trying to enable experiences and interactions with web content beyond the web browser, not to simply re-create the browser experience within a 3D environment. However, there is an important relationship between the browser and web content, and E15 needs to have the ability to talk directly to the browser. As a result, we’ve recently integrated a full-fledged web browser into E15:

With a browser, it becomes trivial to leverage the existing features of E15 to visually represent browser interactions. As a simple first demo, we can load a page into the embedded E15 browser, navigate through a set of pages, and construct a visual history of pages traversed. Show below is the result of the traversal of 9 links starting from google: