It’s time for 3D Mashups
OK, so we’ve spent like 5 or 6 years moving from VRML to X3D…what’s the point! Visually the advanced VRML browsers compete pretty well with X3D browsers but it’s time to make the XML magic really appear. Let’s see a 3D mashup. What’s a mashup…I’m glad you asked!
Mashups are the web’s way of creating a stew (note the food analogies as I’m writing this close to dinner time) from individual ingredients, each of which has nothing to do with each other, except the fact that all the pieces are food. Let’s take Google maps, nice 2D smoothly functioning maps and Amazon’s book store interface which can display popular book purchases on a per zip-code basis. Want to create a map of popular books in the a particular zip coe…no problem. Simply plug in the Amazon API’s exposed by their web services with the Google map API and voila…instant popular book map!
So what’s needed for the 3D version of this, first we need an API to X3D. OOPS I forgot…we almost have one since it’s already in XML we can just get to the data via the DOM (Document Object Model).
More interestingly what are you going to do with a 3D mashup capability?
Let’s think about a few possibilities.
If I had a 3D model of a city, say San Francisco, just for fun and I virtually traveled down a street, I’d like to have proximity sensors fire off as I approched all the retail stores. Those messages could identify all the restaurants. Restaurant reviews can be located by Frommers.com and photo of the place can be served up by CitySearch.com. I would think that setting up some information preferences would be simple enough and could limit the infomation you get to just the items of interest for examle only the photos. So as you cruise around the 3D city, 2D photos pop up.
How about a 3D product maship. Say you zap on over to a web site that has the foresight to utilize a 3D product demonstration of, for example cameras. You play with the 3D Camera and figure out how it works with just the usual type of 3D interactions. The camera parts move, you see where the battery goes in, but wait! How much does that battery cost? Click on it and you get info not from the camera manufacturer but from froogle.com or go out to ebay and see who’s got cheap one’s for sale! And you do all of this from within the comfort of your 3D camera world.
So how’s the stock market doing today (crappy!), want to get a sense of the trends? Just bop on over to your handy dandy 3D stock visuallizer. Many years ago the NY Stock Exchange put up a 3D interface on the market floor for people to explore the “space” of the stock market. You could visualize the market on your desktop with some type of information visualization system, and more interestingly click on items and just go off to the Yahoo or Google finanacial site and get news. You cold plot the geographical locations of those companies on Google 2D maps, and pop up the identification of those high level executives currently in Jail by sucking up data from a criminal justice data set.
Well…start those implementations!