To The Artists and Content Owners
Make it simple.
If you spent weeks, months or years creating a symphony and then came back to it ten years later, you would want it to still be playable by competent musicians. Right? Some 3D artists want the same thing and today, the best deal they have for that is VRML/X3D. I still have the Irishspace CD, a project that was large in scope when it was created over ten years ago by a team of VRML artists from around the world. My son pulled it out to test his new computer. He downloaded a Blaxxun Contact VRML/X3D client for free. He put the CD on. Guess what? It all still works. The difference is, it looks better and runs faster.
Ten years ago I started work on the River of Life world. This week after a long hiatus, I’m working on it again. I haven’t changed any of the geometry. I’ve retextured. I’ve added new features. It all works. I put a proto in it for a sky simulation that Braden McDaniel wrote so long ago that he’d forgotten he wrote it until I showed it to him. I plopped it in the middle of ROL. It works. It just looks better and runs faster.
I don’t want to rely on a closed system like a Mac or SecondLife. I don’t care what professionals doing work for hire tell me about how much money they made this week only to have all of that work disappear behind a firewall with knockoff technology. I don’t want to have to pay middlemen to place the songs I’ve written or recorded on a song download site because the owner decided I have to do that to play in his world.
I want to play in mine. And if I put it down for ten years and then decide to come back to it, I want it to still work. Faster. And look better.
I get that with VRML/X3D. Show me where anyone gets that with the other 3D technologies vieing to be its replacement. If you can make good money reliably in these closed systems, I say do it. If you don’t care that your customers may not be able to keep that content alive by their own initiative, sell it to them. Otherwise, use your money and your influence to see to it that the customer and the content are protected. Open standards implemented by right thinking technology companies who care about your content and your rights to work on that content and keep it working for as long as YOU care to do that provide that. Closed systems, no matter how sexy at the moment, how fashionable for some crowd of some size, or how slickly presented don’t.
Today, you have pretty much one option to keep your content running a decade later: VRML/X3D.