Re: [www-vrml] Re: [x3d-public] Web3D Zeitgeist - most popular format, one year on.

[Bob Crispen - The VRMLworks <revbob@crispen.org>]

The voices are telling me Joshua Smith said on 9/26/2005 8:49 AM:

> For some reason, these absurd exercises really get under my skin...

Evidently.

[snip]

> 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.

Point well taken.  Was it Rikk Carey who lamented that the good thing 
about VRML was that anybody could do it; the bad thing about VRML was 
that *anybody* could do it?

> [[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

Thank God my site used frames and therefore scored abysmally on Google, 
since it's pretty much as you describe.

> (hit #6... Computer Associates!  huh?)]]

VRML's links with CA are broad and deep: CA was for a long while the 
principal download site for Cosmo Player; they had acquired Viewpoint 
Datalabs, a source for superior quality 3D models and a brilliant little 
program called LiveArt which (through Nendo and perhaps a trip somewhere 
along the line through AccuTrans 3D) could import VRML models; and it 
was the home of Cindy Ballreich, who produced a line of low-polygon VRML 
models and a number of compelling e-commerce solutions with VRML, 
including an app for Ticketmaster that let you see how the stage would 
look from any seat in the house.

Perhaps that was a slip of the pen.  Otherwise, I'm sure I'm not the 
only one who's wondering why someone would be so vehement about 
criticizing events and failures in a history he doesn't appear to know.
--
Bob Crispen
The VRMLworks
vrmlworks at crispen dot org
http://vrmlworks.crispen.org/
Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/

Putting angle brackets around things is not a technology by itself.
- Sergei Brin
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
for list subscription/unsubscription,
go to http://www.web3d.org/cgi-bin/public_list_signup/lwgate/listsavail.html