Can X3D and SAI be to real-time 3D what wav files and VST are to music?
Ajax3D offers a solid beginning for server-side event-driven logic combined with a client-side rich 3D GUI in X3D. What we need in addition, is a commercial library of drag and drop components for building applications.
Music software offers a good example. A solid starter kit augmented by affordable libraries of components is how the music software business works. It requires a sustaining market of some size, yes, but that is a chicken and egg problem: somewhere, something has to be laid. In music recording, the enabler isn’t OpenGL but the VST plug-in standard. With a $299 copy of Adobe Audition and relatively cheap gear, one gets a very solid recording studio that compares to and is actually better than anything we used to spend years and many thousands of dollars to acquire. So a kid spends a summer at Burger King to get started. It’s worth it. My son just spent a very hot summer in a garden nursery sweating in the hot houses to pay for his own computer that meets his specs which were quite a bit more pricey and powerful than his Dad’s. Sweat equity has value. So does the software it can buy.
The 3D Generation is coming of working age and starting to buy. I like free plug-ins like everyone else, but the competitive-edge is in the latest and greatest. What we need is for companies beyond the consortium members to support the X3D formats too. X3D and SAI have to be to real-time 3D what wav files and VST are to music. The smart bit in what the AJAX3D people are doing is proving that it can be by showing how X3D unlike VRML is not an exotic niche technology, but a perfectly standard and usable member of the XML family of web application technologies. Now it is a matter of demonstrating to the web developers that it is also a very competitive edge.