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A New Chance For 3D On The Web?
SiliconRedox writes: "The New York Times has an article on the efforts of the Web3D Consortium to update and reinstate VRML as a viable language for Web-based 3D. As with other standards it faces a tough challenge: it isn't HTML. Not many people are keen on rewriting an entire site in a shakey language."
Some efforts are underway to provide OpenGL objects and verticies via XML. Check out XGL or BGL. for example. Given the industry push to XML, wouldn't one of these standards (Well, once they get a little more fleshed out) be a more logical choice?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
In practice one saw a black window (space) full of many colored lozanges each with a node's name. One could then 'fly' around them, zooming in (& into) them to locate information. Apparently the idea was one could index information in such a way that like material was located nearby in 3D space. Frankly it wasn't worth the effort though it had potential.
Like so many other kewl Apple projects this got dumped when the company realized it was bleeding money it couldn't afford out every pore & started killing projects without short-term potential. As I recall the developer left & went to a start-up that quickly sank from sight.
I've seached a few times for the plug-in but it's lost to the winds of time.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Personally, I don't think it is so much as a world definition format (such as VRML) that is needed to get us there, but instead a new physical interface for displaying the content.
Intermediate steps of displaying the 3D on a 2D screen work well for many apps, such as games. However, most games suffer from mainly dealing with movement on a plane. These games allow for a full 6DOF movement, but such movement tends toward being tricky for most people (which is why we don't have a ton of Descent clones). Only good gamers excel in these areas, and learn the control necessary to navigate in the environments effectively. This won't cut it with the normal "joe".
We (people) can easily navigate in a real 3D space. Most of us played on the jungle jim when we were kids, some of us did flips on trampolines, others did cartwheels. We could probably still do these things today (with a little practice), and not get too disoriented. Why? Because we arn't keeping our head still, and we can sense (with our eyes mainly) the world around us, without this "frame" around it (like on a monitor).
For the average person to be able to effectively explore and work in a 3D enviroment, that person needs to be "in" the environment - the term known as "immersion". With current "mainstream" systems (like games and such), there is no immersion. Increasing the monitor size helps, but becomes prohibitive (in cost) for most people after a point (about 21" for most). Even then, it is still a monitor. So, what are the options?
Shutter glasses can add depth, but still only to the boundries of the largest affordable size monitor you buy. A projection system with shutter glasses can be really nice, esp. when coupled with a zero-force chair. However, the cost becomes quite high for the projector (because of the refresh rate needed for the shutter glasses) - let's not even talk about the chair.
You could conceivably build your own chair, and position it close to the screen, so that the projected image encompasses your whole FOV. This is even better (in fact, this is essentially what simulators do - they may do it with a single projection, or a multi-monitor approach, with each monitor representing a window in the "vehicle" - multi-head X could do this quite nicely). However, unless you are pretending you are in a vehicle (like in Descent), problems arise when you want to turn your head, and look around.
These problems can be overcome with an HMD - to do to full immersion. However, until you spend large amounts of $$$, HMD's tend to be low-res, small FOV affairs (though playing Quake in the low-cost VFX-1 is quite fun). This is the tradeoff for full immersion.
Navigation then becomes another issue. Gloves have been tried, but they tend to be a pain (until you move up to say, a VPL Dataglove with a Polhemous tracking system). A cheaper method might involve some sort of 3D "puck" navigation device you could hold in one hand, with a few buttons on it to select options and such with.
Feedback still has to be dealt with (cheap motion platforms are available), and the final bugaboo (at least in a full immersion setup) - simulator sickness (affects a lot of people).
I think immersion is the key to getting a lot of people using 3D environments. It just needs to be cheaper to be accessible to more people (actually, it can be fairly cheap now - but most people won't take the time to implement it - still takes a bit of elbow grease).
I support the EFF - do you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Perhaps I can lend some perspective:
;)
About a year and a half, not quite two years ago a friend of mine had been experimenting with the 3D Consortium's "Cosmoworlds" VRML creation package. As a mechanical engineer, he had ample experience with Autocad, and 3DStudio Max, and found the transition to creating 3d objects and landscapes within the VRML authoring software to be rather simple.
We (along with two other partners) formed a company to test the waters. Our staff included a web content designer (myself), a professional photographer/pre-press layout designer, a salesperson and our VR designer.
Our process, and mission statement was simple: Construct high quality building exterior/interior walkthroughs that could run in a standard Windows web browser; The target being real estate developers, construction companies, colleges wanting virtual tours, and any other application that fit. The actual construction process is simple:
1. Shoot room interiors with high quality digital or 35mm camera
2. Construct room and/or models in Autocad, 3DSMax, Canoma, or Cosmoworlds and import to VRML
3. Optimize texture pallette and quality for size; Trim VRML for same
4. Apply textures to VRML
5. Add scripting for camera flight through scene to create animated flight path; Add scripting for any moving objects in scene.
The resultant output is a photorealistic completely 3D flythrough, user controllable with mouse or keyboard through the scene you have created. The image quality, and viewer experience is substantially better than the "scrolling panoramic java applet" style "VR" that many national realtors are using today.
VRML scenes can have clickable links in them opening in any target window. You can stream audio content through them, in Real or other formats. You could drive an eCommerce site with VRML ("View the interior of your Ford Explorer, and click the seats to add Leather upgrade; etc.)
So what are the problems with VR?
1. The 3D Consortium wants a $15,000 membership fee. This is completely unrealistic for startups. Talent is where you find it, and sometimes that's in four man companies. There are other authoring packages than CosmoWorlds, but you have no feedback channel unless you are a member. The companies that ARE on their board are mentally constipated giants that seemingly haven't furthered VRML's cause in three years.
2. While the finshed animation sizes are small (200-500k for a two or three room walkthrough of near-television quality), the CosmoWorlds PLUGIN required to view it is 2 MEGS. Cross-platform support is non existant. It performs slowly on machines under 300 MHz. On 56k modems, the shaded walls for the scene pop up instantly, but the textures pop up as they stream in.
3. As with any new technology, clients have a built-in level of "FUD" just thinking about it. I could flop my laptop in front of ten company VP's and college presidents, and wow them with the quality and ease of use of the animations being built, but they just didn't "get it." Tell a University president that you'll charter a helicopter, and build a stunning birds' eye flythrough of their campus, including buildings, and all landscaping for $10k, and you hear "oh wow, we though it would cost five TIMES that much! This is great!" Then the waffling starts; and you lose the job. A three foot tall stack of printed brochures will cost that much; Apparently since the technology we proposed couldn't be touched it is tough to justify.
Granted, we DID have a few forward-thinking companies use the technology. We constructed some presentations for the world's largest maker of ATM machines and security products. The potential for the technology as a training aid, sales tool, kiosk display, or presentation medium is amazing. The only real obstacle is the public's subconcious belief that new technologies must be expensive, unwieldy, too complicated, or hardware-intensive to be viable for them.
If you belong to a forward thinking corporation, and would like more information, please email me and I will put you in touch with people who are already BUILDING amazing content with VRML; not just discussing it.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
FTP isn't IRC
IRC isn't Email
Email isn't ICQ
ICQ isn't Web
Web isn't VRML
it's in my head
Another dimension devoid of useful content.
And we'll get advertising coming at us from all angles.
But of course it will also affect pr0n!
i can see it's a good idea and will probably look very nice, but really, i think it will be very impractical.
like in jurassic park when the girl says "wow, it's a unix system, i know this" and then spends ages navigating round the 3D world looking for the right building. all that could be done a lot quicker with the style we use now.
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Never send a man where you can send a bullet.
The place where I work used to develop and support a VRML editor/viewer, and we found that the market really just dried up - this was about a year to year and a half ago. Just no real demand for it. Basically, the VRML stuff was slow as shit - kinda like java, but slower (no offense to java heads :)).
It is kind of cool and all that, but bulky. Also, there was a shaking out of the viewer market a while back when sgi basically dumped Cosmo. Seems to me the merits of the language and its application to the web just don't show enough positives for reinstatement. Just my two cents, you understand.
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
>technology are Web sites like an animated
>nightclub with flashing lights and dancers.
It's like i'm there man!
(well, maybe if I switch to a 14.4k modem and pretend there's some fucked-up strobe light thing going on.)
I played with VRML 1.0 and it was kludgey and awful (I built a church to kill knaves and saints). Ahhh.. but you say VRML has changed, I say I've read the specs and it still appears definately low-fi in terms of the abilities of an OpenGL app or MS-Direct3D (sure they may have been made to deal with different things but they're heading in the same direction - I don't need to tell you the web's slowly bluring location of files and software now do I?). AFAIK there's no bump-mapping, no 3D textures, scripting is klunky and inelegant.
VRML, it was still-born.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
- For years I have been vocal (and largely unrecognized) in my views that VRML was being handled wrongly.. aiming at technical specs rather than what users wanted and what environments to craft that would make it easy for ordinary folks to make 3D spaces. All those 3D modeling tools, however wonderful, will never appeal to a large content community or be able to be used by the ordinary netizen. In addition, and sharing your frustration, the fact that multi user was never treated as a priority was a big problem for VRML and potentially its fatal mistake. Building 3D is fundamentally a social activity (in the real world) and VRML desperately needed a multi user virtual commons where people could come in and kick the tires of new objects or properties, carrying out their development at the level of a real usable visual space. The VRML mailing list approach was a disaster and brought the level of discussion down from the experience of 3D to "text only" code talk and politics. The few multi user vrml spaces made were either not open to the community for development or were efforts too small to drive the development of VRML.
This reminds me so much of Snow Crash.Of course, the reasons could have been basic things like it was slow and clunky. But the above opinions seem valid too.
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I have been waiting for ages for OpenGL accelerated hardware to arrive to the majority of consumer desktops....as this will fuel the vrml revolution. You only have to look at flash usage (on the better sites) to see how people are interested in creating entirely unique UI environments, even windowing environments! VRML is a simple language that allows the creation of complex scenes, but until the TNT level of OpenGL performance arrived, the scenes were rendered at a terrible level (slow, slow, slow). Once people have the performance to throw around a few thousand textuured polys at quake speeds, vrml starts to allow the redefinition of web interfaces to a new paradigm (billboards still allow the use of staticly orientated 2d surfaces).
Secondly I think the SGI releases for Linux should assist in the generation of the content that will show the average user just why the 3d model is far superior for certain content (car showrooms online for example).
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source