Open Standards for Real-Time 3D Communication

The world is finally starting to pay wide-scale attention to 3D!  From Google Earth, to Second Life, to 3D PDFs, to COLLADA, to scores of new uses and implementations of X3D, 3D visualization has finally reached critical mass.  But while it is exciting that there are so many different technology options, how do we decide which solution to use? Is there one standard that fits all markets?  (or in Lord of the Rings parlance: One 3D Standard to Rule Them All)?

As far as the mass consumer market goes, it has been demonstrated over and over that when presented with choice the market CONVERGES to just a few choices and better yet, if there is interoperability between the choices, several might survive. However, before that can happen, many choices usually exist and if the market does not converge down to a few than perhaps a mass consumer market does not yet exist.  Even once there is a a product that dominates the consumer mass market, that does not mean there is no room for other players, particularly if other players cater to markets outside the common mass, cater to unusual vertical markets or are quite useful for less obvious and less well-publicized projects such as interchange and archive. All this leads to a strong need for a standard, and a standard is not a standard without multiple implementations.

There are many businesses that actually do quite well in these “emerging” or “niche” markets.  One can argue that having more than a few choices is optimal for many local conditions rather than having these locales end up living with the over-largess and tyranny of the mass market. Better yet, if these choices can at least save, interchange and archive their provincial data in an easy to parse, easy to re-use format, then that choice will persist, probably regardless of final frame rate.

That is not to say that X3D cannot become a key player in the mass market realm. Someone may indeed develop a lucrative business to prove it so. BS Contact and Flux produce very high quality, very small size high-performance 3D files that are perfect for mass market products. They even include their own encryption techniques.

But X3D seems to be growing most quickly in many vertical and niche markets where open standards, a stable format (i.e. will be viable even 100 years from now), and many different implementations from desktop to mobile, are important factors.  There is everything from health and fitness on handhelds, tons of work in medical imaging, lunar landing simulations, robotic control simulations, and AEC projects.

From a marketing perspective, X3D is small change compared to the proprietary and “heavily filtered” types such as Intel and Adobe, but financial marketing clout cannot overturn equality for all content creators, large, small and public. These are the folks who need a “royalty-free” and easy to use 3D interchange and archival standard. May they continue to make, save and deliver the highest quality graphics possible in their favorite content creator and deliver it at the best possible frame-rate!  We encourage anyone interested in 3D standards to visit us at Siggraph in Boston in early August to see many different examples of real applications in real world uses.

Posted by Rita Turkowski on 2006-07-16 | Permalink | (1) Comments