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Re: [x3d-public] Web3D Zeitgeist - most popular format, one year on.
For some reason, these absurd exercises really get under my skin...
In August 2004 I was wondering about the relative popularity of various Web3D formats. No hard data was available. So I turned as one does in such a situation, to Google.
Gee, let's see. I wonder what the "relative popularity" of various viruses are? Blaster: 6.5M, Netsky: 0.6M, Kournikova: 2.3M; there you have it, Blaster is much more "popular" than Kournikova...
Here's what your numbers say to me...
1) Of the free formats that students and hobbyists have lots of questions and really bad demos, 10-year-old VRML has a lot more references than 4-year-old X3D. What a shock. [[You should go visit the top 100 hits for VRML, by the way. You'll quickly see that it is a wasteland of ancient demos, dead links, and pages that have absolutely nothing to do with VRML (hit #6... Computer Associates! huh?)]]
2) As google & friends continue to index more obscure parts of the web, the number of hits on everything continues to increase.
3) When you search for the name of an obscure underlying technology (U3D) you get a lot fewer hits than you get if you search for the extremely popular formats that use that technology ("3D PDF").
If you really want to know what technology people use to deploy web 3D, it is a much harder exercise than some silly googlewhacking. For example, search google for site:dell.com 3d and you'll see that we have created dozens, maybe hundreds, of interactive web 3D experiences at dell. However, because Dell is a commercial enterprise with their own branding to worry about, you are going to have to dig to find out what technology made that 3D appear (for example, right click on the applet). Google is hard-pressed to realize that Kaon's technology produced those pages.
The same would be true if you went crawling the web looking for Viewpoint 3D or Cult 3D or Shockwave 3D or any other 3D format that is actually used in the commercial web.
Despite the 4 million hits you found, I'm hard pressed to think of a single example of VRML being used in a commercial application...
-Joshua Smith
CTO/Alpha Geek
jesmith@kaon.com
Kaon Interactive Inc.
Tel. (978) 823-0111 x111
http://www.kaon.com/
Kaon Interactive
Web-Enabled Sales Solutions for Product Companies
On Sep 25, 2005, at 11:27 AM, Viveka Weiley wrote:
Hi all,
I've repeated my survey of google hits for the major Web3D formats.
The results surprised me...
http://www.karmanaut.com/virtuality/zeitgeist/
Regards,
V.
--
Viveka Weiley, Karmanaut. http://www.karmanaut.com
For a Free Geospace: http://www.planet-earth.org | http://www.ping.com.au
VR on the Mac: http://www.MacWeb3D.org
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