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Khronos Launches Initiative For Standards-Based 3-D Web Content
xororand writes "The initiative called 'Accelerated 3D on the web' has been formed by the Khronos consortium with the goal to define an open standard for 3D content on the web, using OpenGL and ECMAscript, as it was suggested by Mozilla developers. 'The Khronos(TM) Group today announced an initiative to create an open, royalty-free standard for bringing accelerated 3D graphics to the Web. In response to a proposal from Mozilla, Khronos has created an "Accelerated 3D on Web" working group that Mozilla has offered to chair. This royalty-free standard will be developed under the proven Khronos development process with a target of a first public release within 12 months.'
Unlike previous attempts to establish 3D standards for the web, this one might be actually successful due to the use of existing open standards, and the increasing performance of ECMAscript engines."
I've been trying to figure out how to get web pages to load slower. There are only so many things you can add to a page before you run out of ideas, and as cool as it is, the falling snow effect looks stupid 3 out of 12 months a year.
Yeah I know it has real potential for some serious implementations, but we all know that you're just going to have 3d rotating logs, 3d menus and other such junk more than anything else.
Dual Opteron < $600
Yeah, because standardizing web content has worked so very well thus far. This should take right off and just roll. No problems whatsoever. Yep.
Obviously there has been one particular company working hard to hold back Web standards. That said, between legal scrutiny of those actions and the slow erosion of their Web install share to both alternative browsers and alternative platforms (e.g. smartphones) standards are becoming both more important and more applied.
Went to see Coraline last weekend. Good movie, but the best thing I can say about its use of 3D is that it didn't get in the way. Mostly.
All these idiots who keep pushing 3D media at us. WE DON'T WANT IT. It doesn't make anything "more real". Quite the opposite. Since you can never do it completely right with anything resembling current media, you end up with a lot of half-baked complications (the "foreground" objects in Coraline often look like cardboard cutouts) that make it that much harder to immerse yourself in the movie, the GUI, or whatever.
(When you invent a completely new medium in which 3D makes sense, like those "holodecks" on Star Trek, get back to us.)
And as for GUIs, they make interaction more complicated. The whole point of GUIs is to make interaction simpler. If I want to keep track of a lot of extraneous detail, I'll use a CLI.
I write hardware manuals for a living, and there are some people at our company who want us to start embedding 3D interactive models in the PDF versions of our manuals. If I thought this proposal was going to go anywhere (we don't even have enough resources to do more basic authoring easily) I'd be very noisily opposing it. Lots of extra work, all to make using our manuals a little more difficult. No thanks.
Pedantic is one thing, just plain wrong is another.
"Content" is logical, not physical, and therefore this statement is wrong. And the web isn't a 2d surface (or any other kind of surface), so even if the statement was true so far as it goes, it would still be irrelevant to whether there can be 3D content on the Web. And since the human visual system uses a pair of 2D sensors to synthesize a 3-dimensional model of the portion of the universe seen, its pretty clear that you can present as good of a presentation of 3D content as humans can deal with using via 2D images, provided you do it just right. And, of course, you can do 2D projections from a 3D model even with one 2D surface, with quite useful results (and, if you deliver the 3D model to the user agent, which then performs whatever requested manipulations the user wants, with a whole lot less latency than if the server had to generate 2D images from a 3D object model and send them over the wire in response to queries for different views of the same model from the same user agent.)
You confuse presentation mechanisms with content.
If I remember my history, HTML started as a way to store linked information. Then it was badly hacked to be a way to poorly layout documents. Then java script was stapled onto it. Then the whole mess was turned into the kluge that is ajax. Now someone's trying to duct tape 3-D onto that.
I for one look forward to a day when the web is a more dynamic environment, where information is presented more fluidly instead relying on the old metaphor of static published pages, but I can't believe this is a sane way forward. It seems like instead of looking for a better way to present information they're just duct taping crap onto the same old model. Kind of like achieving flight by strapping a rocket motor to horse drawn carriage.
Don't mess with the bunny, outsideworld.org