Bringing Online Shopping Into the Future With the 3D Web

An anonymous reader writes "While there is now the possibility of using 3D in the browser over WebGL, it is still hard for regular web developers to get 3D content into websites without being hardcore graphics programmers. XML3D, a project at the Intel Visual Computing Institute, tries to tackle that problem by having a very easy-to-use language as an extension of HTML5. The goal is to standardize it with the W3C. There are already modified Firefox and Chrome browsers that support XML3D natively. At Intel's Research Blog you can find a video on what shopping at an online store could soon look like. In the example, the user purchases a DSLR that can be fully interacted with in 3D, including attaching various lenses and an external flash."

Comments

Yay

[slackware 3.6]

the new VRML.

Re:Yay

[Zadaz]

Exactly. This adds nothing to VRML (Or any of the other dozen 3D web technologies that went under this same headline in years past.)

Okay, that's not entirely true. Over the past it has the following advantages:

- It's buit into the browser, so no plugins.

- Computers are much faster so performance should be better.

- Bandwidth is higher so files transfer faster.

But none of the gets to the heart of the problem with 3D:
- 3D artists are much more expensive than a production artist running Photoshop and creating attractive 3D content takes much longer than a flat image. This makes the content much more expensive to produce.

- The quality is not there. If you want to show off the highest quality vision of your product you want Photoshoped images. 3D just doesn't have it. Even with high resolution 3D scanners and hours of cleanup by a train artist it will still look sub-par compared to properly prepped 2D images.

- There are very few 3D interface designers worth a damn. And they're all working much higher paid jobs making games. That leaves people who sort of saw a scene in Jonny Mnemonic on late-night TV years ago when they were a little drunk, and thought it would be neat to make an interface like that. This turns away customers. And even if they did hire one of those great designers away from the games industry, 3D is still a horrible interface for a 2D spreadsheet, which is what most web sites are.

- Phones.

With the exception of the last, these problems will always exist, and always doom the 3D web.

The single case I've seen for 3D web in 20+ years of doing 3D are online 3D libraries like Thingiverse where, in this case, you can preview an STL before downloading.

Disclosure: I have worked with web and 3D since 1996 and have been directly involved with a number of doomed 3D web projects in that time. They were all essentially identical with the exception of the name of the 3D plugin/file format.

Re:What a waste of time

[unrtst]

Right example, WRONG conclusion!

All too often when I shop on Amazon, products won't have adequate pictures that allow me to see a product from all angles and zoom factors. Many products don't even bother to list full specs. Just today I was shopping for a new projector, but many of them don't list the supported connection types, so it would be nice to be able to rotate and zoom a 3D model of the projector and visually verify that it has what I need.

If {online retailer} can't be bothered to snap a few pictures with their camera phone and/or copy/paste the product specs, what makes you think they'll bother to obtain a full blown interactive 3d representation of the device? This is why this is doomed (for online shopping at least).

Newegg (my personal favorite retailer of electronic goods except for cables, which is then monoprice) already does nice 2d pictures with zoom support so you can zoom in and see what connections are there, and you can often make out the tiny little labels even. Sometimes, they also have a 360 degree view, which is really just a series of pics shot around the product, and a slider that lets you change the pictures in order via flash (but could easily be done in JS or HTML5 etc). There is very very very little benefit to a complete 3d model over these, and it's a lot more work, it's more expensive to produce, it's less compatible with existing browsers, it's higher bandwidth, and more difficult/complicated to use, and it will likely be lower resolution.

Still photos are by far the easiest thing for a retailer to add. Snap, and attach to the product profile. You're complaining (and I agree) that there aren't enough of these already... you're delusional if you think a 3d model will show up on all those products that don't even list the basic specs or more than one pic.

360 degree photos are also quite easy, especially for a big retailer that can setup one rig to do them (ex. a single camera, product on a lazy susan, spin it while shooting a movie or taking pics, paste result to 360 degree image maker or just make it a gif), and very few products have these even some of the best retailer sites.

3d online shopping - not going to happen. Stop expecting fancy new tech to solve operational issues that have simple solutions in place that aren't being used.

3d models on the manufacturer page - I can definitely imagine this showing up on high priced items.

Second Life tried this

[biodata]

Everyone bought cocks, got bored and left.