Of course, I will recommend Tk. :-) Gtk2 is great too, but Tk is so easy to get installed on Windows with ActiveStatePerl, and it works well with Par, if you desire. Tk executable on non-perl machine

As far as making it look good, it all depends on how much effort you want to put into it.

I don't understand why you just can't use a cgi script and a web-browser. Maybe you need to provide more information? Are you able to run a server-side script for you to connect to? Or are you connecting via SSH? What sort of display do you envision? You can make the Tk::Canvas into just about anything you desire, and if you use Tk::Zinc, you can have alpha layers. (See the ex #7 in the OpenGL section of the "zinc-demos" program.

Just remember that Tk is just for display and event-looping. The real logic is done by Perl behind the scenes. So concentrate first on how would I do this with plain Perl, then once you have that solved, the final step is to add the Tk gui.