Yep, it's that time again kids. Gather round and hear the story of yet another "we're giving you the Internet—but in 3D!" product.

ExitReality (get it?) is a company based in Melbourne, Australia that apparently isn't very happy with browsing, searching, and socializing on the web in its current state. Thursday, it released a plug-in named after itself that "allows anyone to view every web page in 3D." Its ExitReality plug-in is built for IE and Firefox on Windows (though you won't find any of those details on its barren download page), and also offers 3D search, chat with other users, customizable avatars, social networking, and virtual recreations of real-world destinations.

The idea behind ExitReality is that when browsing the web in the old-n-busted 2D version you're undoubtedly using now, you can hit a button to magically transform the site into a 3D environment that you can walk around in and virtually socialize with other users visiting the same site. This shares many of the same goals as Google's Lively (which, so far, doesn't seem so lively), though ExitReality is admittedly attempting a few other tricks.

Installation is performed via an executable file which places ExitReality shortcuts in Quick Launch and on the desktop, but somehow forgets to add the necessary ExitReality button to Firefox's toolbar. After adding the button manually and repeatedly being told our current version was out of date, we were ready to 3D-ify some websites and see just how much of reality we could leave in two-dimensional dust.

Aaaand there you have it. ExitReality is designed to offer different kinds of 3D environments that center around spacious rooms that users can explore and customize, but it can also turn some sites like Flickr into virtual museums, hanging photos on virtual walls and halls. Strangely, it's treating Ars Technica as an image gallery and presenting it as a malformed 3D gallery.

A visit to Flickr demonstrates one of ExitReality's few marginally appealing abilities, but even this was an embarrassing and awkward display of what happens when a shiny VC pipe dream meets engineers who don't have anything better to do.

We never got a chance to test ExitReality's social or chat features since we never ran into another user, even at popular 2D web destinations. Sorry the campfire story couldn't have been more interesting, but we're pretty sure rendering this article in 3D won't help matters much. The "Internet in 3D!" thing has been attempted more times than we can count, but if a conceptual and financial juggernaut like Google can't get very far with it, we aren't too surprised that ExitReality has stumbled as well.