Commenting on: We would like to thank all visitors to the Web3D booth at Siggraph!
The August 2007 Siggraph exhibition gathered Web3D consortium members from around the world together to show their latest ISO standard X3D based application for social networking, 3D Medical imaging, scientific visualization and 3D education. This year Web3D had an exhibition booth twice the size as last year with half a dozen web3D company exhibitors. Read on:
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Even as Second Life is experiencing a backlash from the web community, X3D/VRML keep being pushed forward by individual developers and institutions which means that all media and corporate hype aside, it maintains its place as the pioneering technology for 3D on the web. Despite the awards given to the metaverse pundits, the investments made by major corporations and the funding from the investment community, money and artificial hype stimulants cannot create anything more than a flash in the pan interest on the web. It takes genuine openness and access to the technology itself proving that a content community alone cannot do it either. Linden Labs made critical mistakes:
1. Allowing false history to develop in the SL blogs. This is fatal mistake. The essence of what the web is is a documentrepository for preserving memory. Anyone could check dates and facts. That robbed any SL-led 3D movement of credibility.
2. Taking the same wounding tactic that many other technologists did including VRML: overpromising results. Castronova has a long way to go to really understanding virtual systems as economies. Virtual means virtual: Chuck E Cheese tokens devalue fast when the stage puppets quit being a novelty and the pizza is still bad pizza.
3. Failing to use standard technologies. This wouldn’t be fatal but it means there is no amplification through orthogonal applications. X3D works for virtual worlds but it also works for medical technologies. This is how standards justify the title. They work in niches large and small. In this case, VR is an application of 3D on the web.
4. Failing to understand that the costs of 3D content ownership are high given the talent and time required, then absorbing all of those costs of hosting while failing to pick up the profits from authoring. Thus, Electric Sheep makes money. LL loses money. That’s a terrible business plan.
5. Bringing in too many newbies and allowing them to be credited as experts. In the open news articles that allow comments, these people get beaten up for their lack of depth and that also robs them of credibility.
The problem will be as stated before if the falling fortunes of the virtual world/server farm builders rolls back over the entire web 3D market, baby and bathwater. It depends on the numbers. Meanwhile, companies are discovering the Web3D people were right about the need for public companies to host private worlds and to resist doing private business in public phone booths. If enough skilled experts are hired into these companies to create, develop and maintain these worlds, and these companies select the unencumbered open technologies for 3D that reduce costs rather than creating client-server systems at the OpenGL layer (reinventing an expensive wheel), this may augur well for the web 3D market. Otherwise costs will create another cascading collapse of the market.
This is a good time for the authors and other 3D professionals to take a hard cold look at their skills and toolkits and expand them to include the open technologies that can be blended in to the professional database platform frameworks, and to have dreams of other than cyberspace, to think in terms of specific uses of visualization systems such as complexity assessment modeling. Virtual worlds are here to stay but like so many other hosted environments, the business plan has to be based on sustainable revenues because the investors are running out of patience.
I think you focus too much on practical issues. web3d is a natural part of the web, that is ALL. This aspect has to do with creativity more than programming and on your stupid site, this has ZERO coverage.
You need to attract users, prior to atracting the corporations.
This means making entertaining, fun worlds instead of some labrat experiment visualized in 3d.
Basically, you are trying to evolve 3d too fast. The technology,bandwidth basically doesn’t allow for anything useful for mass consumption… only fun stuff.
Web3d needs to focus on heart stuff as opposed to brain stuff.
we are just not there yet. we are barely at the beginning stages
of creating this, and the heart stuff should come first.
”...web3d is a natural part of the web, that is ALL. This aspect has to do with creativity more than programming and on your stupid site, this has ZERO coverage.”
Really? See http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/rol/TheRiverofLife.wrl
Provided because of fifteen years of a community dedicated to art and science for the web: that’s evolution… and heart.
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