Beginning today, online visitors to the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s Web sites can explore and interact on the Web in 3D. CKE Restaurants, Inc., parent company of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s restaurant chains, has partnered with Web pioneers, ExitReality, to offer the new technology, which allows users to experience traditional, 2-dimensional Web sites as 3-dimensional spaces. Users with the ExitReality browser enhancement can convert their profile pages on social network platforms, such as MySpace, into 3D environments and move around in them as photo-realistic “avatars,” which are human figures with many possible movement options. Visiting “friends” using ExitReality will also appear as avatars for a more real-world type of interaction online, complete with the ability to make one’s avatar gesture, laugh, and talk in text form.

Users will be able to download and try the pre-release version of the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s 3D experience by visiting http://www.carlsjr.com, http://www.hardees.com, the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s fan profile pages on MySpace, or http://www.exitreality.com. The software and everything the user experiences are free.

Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s were the first brand partners of UK-based ExitReality, who has since signed on with the social network platform MySpace to unveil ExitReality and the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s 3D experience.

For the initial launch, each MySpace member gets a 3D apartment that automatically includes their music, friends, comments, and videos, and can be decorated in limitless ways. Using 3D avatars, a user can don a logoed jacket, meet friends at the Carl’s Jr. or Hardee’s virtual restaurant, or invite friends over to the burger-themed social-network living room.

The avatars can take free Carl’s Jr. or Hardee’s goods back to their virtual living rooms, including burgers, fries, and shakes, or a branded “Time to Eat” clock that sounds an alarm when it’s lunchtime.

Any visitors to a burger lover’s decorated profile page can see the free virtual goods or 3D widgets and grab a copy to put in their own profile page in 3D, which will spread Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s burgers into social network 3D places across the Internet.

The Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s sites will feature even more 3D interactivity, as well as an updated look, when the brands’ Web sites are re-launched later this summer.