Open Standards for Real-Time 3D Communication

Technology commentators often determine subjective “winners” and “losers” in terms of mass market uptake and perceived consumer mindshare. VRML especially has been pronounced dead more times than I can remember yet it survives to this day and thrives in some sectors with the X3D evolution of the standard.

I think such pronouncements of victory or defeat are ill-informed and premature as no single real-time 3D technology has been able to capture a critical mass of end-users and content developers. I feel this is the case because 1) it’s exceedingly difficult to develop quality real-time 3D content, 2) there is a smaller overall developer community (than say those creating 2D web sites for instance) and mostly 3) because there are so many real-time 3D technologies to choose from that this comparatively small community is totally fragmented. This has always been the case, despite repeated attempts from well-funded, big players like IBM, Intel, Adobe, Macromedia and Viewpoint etc to rally users behind one proprietary platform.

For these reasons and many more VRML/X3D shouldn’t be compared to other standardization attempts. It’s useless for example to compare it with XHTML or “Flash versus SVG” as they are fundamentally different beasts.

I’ve seen literally hundreds of real-time 3D technologies launched over the last decade with much fanfare, only to disappear entirely, leaving their respective communities adrift and much fantastic content lost forever. As a content developer myself, having the stability of the VRML standard has meant my content has a lifespan beyond the fickle proprietary market. This alone is enough to justify and advocate standards. I know that despite the loss of one or more implementations, there will always be another comparable X3D implementation on which I can deploy my content. This almost guaranteed content longevity is the key in my opinion.

And yet in using and advocating the use of the X3D standard, I am not settling for “second best”. Much has changed for the better in X3D since the VRML97 standard and many of the new features like programmable shaders, layers, continuous-mesh humanoid animation, particle systems, multi-texturing and the upcoming rigid body physics component ensure that X3D remains surprisingly up-to-date with the state of the art in real-time 3D graphics.

So, despite premature announcements of the death of VRML, it is alive and well in the form of X3D. No other single real-time 3D technology has prevailed as long and continued to evolve despite a steady barrage of (often unfounded) criticism.

I no longer care that VRML/X3D hasn’t yet attained critical mass (because no real-time 3D technology has) and it is pointless at this stage for the armchair pundits to predict a winner or, for that matter, write off the competition. It’s not a war. We can and do learn from the successes of other proprietary technologies. At present, there is room in the market for everyone, although there is likely to be some market consolidation in future, and an increasing push towards standards, as has been evident in other technology markets.

Posted by Brian Hay on 2007-02-12 | Permalink | Comments