3D Formats from Commercial Software vs. VRML & Java3D?

RickMuller asks: "I'm interested in molecular graphics, a field entirely dominated by OpenGL. I would love to see something more web-friendly come along. I've worked with VRML and Java3D, and have been very puzzled why these technologies didn't become ubiquitous. Now there are new 3D efforts by Adobe and Macromedia (the Adobe Atmosphere download is available as a beta-download and is way cool!). The press is heralding this as the 3D web revolution. Why should these technologies succeed when VRML or Java3D failed?"

Comments

My take on the situation...

[cmowire]

The situation for 3D is messy. Just leave it at that.

VRML tried to be the end-all, be-all 3D file format. Which it isn't, BTW, as advances in computer graphics have made VRML not very useful for the kinds of things I want. It is just too general purpose.

The new Web 3D formats are trying to capture a discrete market. People want to see a product in 3D before they purchase it. Of all of them, I rate Macromedia as the most likely to grab the market, given that the Flash plugin is one of the few plugins you can count on having. But they have a little better likelyhood of some success, but only if they latch onto an existing technology, IMHO.

The reason why mollecular modeling is all OpenGL based is pretty simple. OpenGL is a pretty nice library for getting 3D geometry to the graphics card for rendering. It works under any decent OS (Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, WinNT, Win2k, IRIX, etc) that you would want to do that sort of thing on. Programmers have mollecular modeling code that is many years old, probably first designed to work on some sort of early SGI machine, that they have just been linearly porting over to newer platforms without rewriting it.

To make a VRML-based platform, they would have to rewrite things. Sure they might provide an output format for VRML so that you could put it up in a web-based query format. But anything more would require you to rewrite things massively, which isn't a good idea, especially when you can still get p1mp OpenGL cards from Sun, HP, and a few others.