Slashdot Mirror
Universal3D vs. Real Open Standards
viveka writes "Back in April, Slashdot reported the announcement of a Universal 3D File Format by Intel, Microsoft & others - to be "as open as MP3". Of course, that's not all that open. And this turns out to be the sneaky part. There is a real open standard already - X3D is ISO-ratified, royalty-free, and has multiple open source implementations. U3D is "going to be submitted to ISO" - one day - but right now they're talking to ECMA, which allows royalty-bearing patents.
I found this article by Tony Parisi, co-chair of the X3D Working Group a fascinating insider's picture of the standards wars, along with insights into what it takes to release an online game, what really killed VRML, and why open standards do (and don't) matter.
I mean, a royalty-bearing, pseudo-open universal 3D format from Intel and Microsoft? Sorry, guys. That trick doesn't work anymore ;)"
MS isn't interested in helping the competition, they're trying to push down the competition. As long as they have a monopoly and they ignore standards, it can make it even easier for them to retain their monopoly. We hear all the time about how people don't want to use non-MS products due to incompatabilities. I would be very surprised if MS ever actually does conform to web standards and such.
Hi there
Ok seriously there are too many hyperlinks. Which one is the article. You don't need to hyperlink every single word to get your point across!
Maybe that is why VRML and X3D were not successful. Storing binary data like 3D vector data and texture data in a text file and then compressing the text file to get acceptable file sizes is just plain stupid.
Binary storage for 3D data makes a lot more sense since it is more compact and easier to parse, and there are also standards such as the IEEE float and double standard.
But nowadays everything has got to be XML, even if it does not make any sense at all. XML is fine for configuration files and office documents, but for image and vector data it is just not the right tool.
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
Don't foget Collada This format, headed up by sony and supported by all the major 3d modelling packages, was first released at SIGGPAPH, and it has a lot of promise.
I disagree. Storing vector data in text files has tha advantage that in extreme case, I can always edit the file with just a text editor.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
I mean, a royalty-bearing, pseudo-open universal 3D format from Intel and Microsoft? Sorry, guys. That trick doesn't work anymore ;)
Why not? Microsoft still has 95% of the browser market, if you think "that trick doesn't work anymore", you're a moron. They're still in a position to dictate standards, and they've shown that they have no qualms about doing so.
Of course, this is yet another area where there is simply nothing that is truly patentable, but I'm sure they can sucker the idiots at the patent office to give them a few, anyway.
Do you have ESP?
Tony Parisi doesn't seem to get it--the best way to kill off X3D from getting mindshare was to make it an ISO standard, because almost all ISO standards cannot be freely shared in electronic form and the process takes too long to revise deficiencies. What is really pathetic is with all of his experience Parisi still wasn't able to see that the best way to spread a software technology and overthrow the existing order is to make the standard as freely accessible as RFCs or W3C standards.
For software ISO standards only "work" with already existing market leaders. And even market leaders can be eventually dragged down by the restrictions of being an ISO standard, such as the deficiencies of C++ leading to the creation of Java and C#. Making a software technology such as X3D an ISO standard before it had any market share was simply madness, and Parisi should have known better.
Both of which are proprietary formats.
Just because a company chooses to make certain applications that use their format open source doesn't make their format a standard. Furthermore, neither of these companies have enough spin to make their proprietary format a de facto standard.
X3D is being put through the ISO standards process, and U3D is being designed by huge industry players.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Going out on a limb here, but couldn't it also be that there is NO USE for 3d on the internet? Most people won't even dive deeper than 2 clicks to get where they want to be, and you think that they are going to walk down a virtual street into a virtual store and manually look around? No chance in hell, snow blind be damned.
While the size of some 3D data sets is a concern with XML, XML is otherwise very well suited for such data. It is often irregular (which makes relational databases tough) and hierarchical (with elements sitting at different places in a scene graph). So it fits XML almost perfectly.
Furthermore, with XSLT, or any of the bindings that enable XML structures to be reflected as objects in a programming language, processing the data becomes easy.
Finally, you can always edit it manually.
Binary descriptions are nice, usually compact (not always). But with binary descriptions you always have to worry about floating point formats, endianness and how to represent the data in your program - so for every binary data description you have to write a reader for the data, a writer and a new converter for every output format you might choose. With XML, libraries for reading, writing and converting (XSL is very powerful for that) are being written for most languages so you can use one of those that is already there, or if you do have to write one, you can reuse it for other types of data in the future.
I've written programs to read and write binary data of more types than I'd care to admit, and I've stared at hex dumps of the data files for way too long. I've had to look at un-documented or under-documented binary formatted files and puzzle out what every bit did more than a few times. (Of course since the DMCA I would never puzzle out undocumented binary data files.)
Finally you say, "XML is fine for configuration files and office documents" but there are those who say that XML is precisely wrong for those kinds of files. In fact, every time someone mentions XML as being used for "Purpose X" on slashdot, you can expect the immediate response "XML is completely inappropriate for Purpose X" comments.
I'm also a bit curious - for the 3D descriptions, how does bzipped XML compare to an equivalent binary file for size?
...it's opt-in targeted e-marketing!
To summarize: if your code is slipped into another product and not clearly mentioned in the license and listed in the installer, or if it phones home without telling the user that it's going to do it, IMHO it is spyware. WildTangent (as it was bundled with AIM) fits both those conditions.
Maybe you're not selling spyware anymore, but you did in the past, and on slashdot that reputation takes a *long* time to live down. Just look at any thread about Realplayer...
0 1 - just my two bits
If an error of 1e-9 like that in one of your transformation matrices led to completely wrong output, then allow me to suggest that the software you're using was pretty poorly written. What if the user was slowly rotating an object and passed through 90.0001 degrees, for example? If the almost-90 degrees case case caused trouble, I can't imagine that the system wasn't riddled with other problems.
And trying to use band-aids like M_PI_2 just hides the root problem.
Who in the world decided that radians were more intuitive to work with than degrees?
Well, given that radians are based on the actual mathamatics of angles (i.e., one radian is a "straight angle"), I guess God did. Or whatever deity you believe in. Athiests will have to blame it on random chance, and I'm not sure about agnostics.
Seriously, degrees (and minutes and seconds) are just like other "traditional" units of measure (like yards and feet and inches), in that some humans in the past cooked them up based on something pretty arbitrary. Working with them is a pain. The SI units make much more sense.
Only people who grew up with non-SI units prefer non-SI units. That's why I sometimes use inches rather then centimeters, and still think of temperatures in Fahrenheit and not Celsius. It's not that the non-SI units are "more intuitive"; they're simply what I'm used to.
Obviously, you're used to degrees. I am too. However, you and I and everyone else here at Slashdot today will not be around forever. As the time passes, more and more people will grow up on SI. Better that this standard use units based on something relevant to the subject, rather then the arbitrary decisions of old.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
An open XML format like X3D is not for usual storage or keeping internal 3D data.
This is to enable a standard and easy to parse interchange and long term archive format for 3D data.
Implementation specific 3D data may still be of any internal format suited for any specific application and hardware.
Plugin specific and parametric 3D data can easyly be later integrated in the X3D document by using namespaces. That makes much sense that way.
Think of XML as an alienX<--->alienZ protocol where aliens may be computer programs, humans, or whatever outerspace yet to be known data processing enabled entity.
When I read and edit an xml document. Do you realy belive it is stored and computed in XML in my brain internals ? (who knows ? ;)
Léa Gris
MP3 is open "The Open Group" way. Think of early Unix advertising before the free Unix-likes got popular. =)
"Open" in Ancient Computer Marketing Vocabulary means roughly "if you have a little bit of money to cover our expenses and the holiday trips for our executives, you can get a specification from us - and if you pay even more, you can actually use the thing for making money."
Yes, it was "open" - because you had a chance of getting the specification and license somehow.
"Closed" was defined as "oh, damn, I don't think we have specs for this thing for sale, even looking at the format makes my head ache", or "Don't even ask about the spec, and we'll sue if you reverse-engineer this thing."
The meanings have fluctuated a bit, especially regarding "open" - you see, back in the day, people thought that stuff that was merely a bit open was "open". Nowadays, there's open... and then there's Open. =)