Clay isn't much of a fan of 3D and
that's legendary. On the other hand, I can't quarrel with his skepticism
regards SL. SL seems to be to real-time 3D on the Web what Netscape was
to HTML browsers and may be headed for the same fate as the fad
wears.
http://www.valleywag.com/tech/second-life/a-story-too-good-to-check-221252.php
IBM's entry into the market is
more serious. They see the same markets that some of the 3D
veterans have known were there. The value of the interface is precisely
that it engenders the sensation of presence, what the old simulation experts
referred to as the power of onset cues to the human brain. So as a
collaboration medium for work at a distance, it is better and possibly
cheaper, maybe even more reliable than video conferencing.
Then you have to consider the 'off
the web' markets. For example, the music industry can't seem to
figure out how to keep CD sales from sagging although their immediate demise
is exaggerated. The Wal-Mart economy can be bootstrapped by packaging
music wrapped in 3D which any gamer can tell you is the cheapest 3D surround
sound engine there is. This takes advantage of the
phenomenon that once a luxury becomes a feature, it becomes a
necessity. The technical aspects of this are easy and the
production costs are the dilemma (3D content isn't cheap to build no matter
who says it is). Products such as VCommunicator from VCom3D
indicate what the military or Berlitz can do with the technology given good
authoring tools. If you’ve ever sent any of your employees to India or
China or brought them here, you know that the faster you can get past the
cultural and language barriers, the faster you can get down to business and
the better the results.
http://www.web3d.org/casestudies/2006/12/iraqi_checkpoint_training_usin/
What SL and IBM indicate is that
3D is here to stay in various forms. It never went away. Clay was
dead wrong about that and probably did give bad advice, but skepticism about
the imminent second coming of the web in 3D is healthy. As yet another
entertainment offering, it will have a season. As technical innovation
in that market, consider it Technicolor or Panavision which had their day and
passed into history as digital production overtook 35mm film, but people
seldom go back to black and white except for art flicks.
Now it is a matter of smart money,
branding and IP. Of those, the third is where the real trouble will
start. Despite what Clay said about VRML being dead, there is only one
real world-accepted standard for real time 3D. It is the ISO standard
for X3D, son of VRML.
What remains to be seen is what
the smart money will do about the existence of royalty-free unencumbered
international standards for a technology they wish to burgle. If
history is a judge, some analog of the W3C which burgled SGML from ISO to
create XML will be tried. OTOH, Rome having been savaged
once has had the time to get ready for the Celts.
len