Open Standards for Real-Time 3D Communication

In the evolution of a technology family based on standards and specifications, there comes a point where an unnoticeable shift begins away from the academic or early-adopter dominance of the market for that technology and toward the commercial users.  X3D/VRML has reached that point.

Philip Rosedale of Linden Labs is quoted on the web as saying that VRML and X3D are the “academic side” of virtual reality on the Internet.  Despite VRML’s early surge forward, it appears to many pundits and professionals that the markets for real-time 3D is to be dominated by the proprietary applications and sites such as Linden’s SecondLife or Ed Castronova’s new Shakespeare worlds represent.

Yet as X3D is being accepted even begrudgingly in some circles, I am noticing a sea change.  The Web3DC site on which this blog appears is increasingly filled with articles about new implementation, extended features, and applications focused on narrower niche markets.  Simultaneously, I am reading sites such as Castronova’s TerraNova that are filling up with the kind of academic speculative pieces that are more or less exactly the same in style, content and topic as we saw in the salad days of VRML.

I have to wonder if there is a quiet and steady rise in the acceptance of X3D as THE standard for real-time 3D on the web among diverse applications.  Even as the proprietary neighborhood sites are filling up with members, struggling with server support and new features given a limited staff, even as the true academics of the trade are studying these worlds and publishing rehashed topics with smarter self-selected vocabularies, the mortar of the 3D web edifice is increasingly turning out to be X3D and the W3DC standards.  The reasons are unremarkable:  available open source, a survivor community mentality, clear unencumbered IP and acquisition support from the government and state city sectors that create markets for the targeted applications, or as Eric Marranne noted, “we don’t sell syntax” but as we all know, without that, there is nothing to sell at all in an open standard.

I am reading articles that claim SecondLife is already at the tipping point for becoming the defacto standard for 3D on the web.  I doubt that.  I don’t dispute the large membership numbers or that commercial entities such as Sun are flocking there.  On the other hand, I think this may not be as much a standard although it provides examples for the quality required, but a trendy new neighborhood such as one finds in any city building at the edges.  The value increases like equity until the neighborhood is completely built, then stabilizes and begins to decline as the richer inhabitants move on to better even newer and therefore more trendy digs.

On the other hand, a real standard fits into any neighborhood the way that mortar is used on any brick house regardless of cost or locale.  This is a game for the persistent and the long term players.  The critical qualities needed for mortar are the ease and readiness of application.  In markup systems, really any authoring system with loosely coupled integration, ease is the Chinese handcuff because the more it is used, the higher the switching costs.  In a world of commoditized services, switching costs are ideally zero, but the practical reality is that format and syntax loosely coupled to the application object model act as barriers for conversion and conversion costs are the friction in the frictionless system.

You can always change the style of the bricks; the mortar only changes color.