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Why Hasn't 3D Taken Off For the Web?
First time accepted submitter clockwise_music writes "With HTML5 we're closer to the point where a browser can do almost everything that a native app can do. The final frontier is 3D, but WebGL isn't even part of the HTML5 standard, Microsoft refuses to support it, Apple wants to push their native apps and it's not supported in the Android mobile browser. Flash used to be an option but Adobe have dropped mobile support. To reach most people you'd have to learn Javascript, WebGL and Three.js/Scene.js for Chrome/Firefox, then you'd have to learn Actionscript + Flash for the Microsofties, then learn Objective-C for the apple fanboys, then learn Java to write a native app for Android. When will 3D finally become available for all? Do you think it's inevitable or will it never see the light of day?"
I guess you might be stating my opinion; but my thought is why? What is the 3d web going to give me that 2d doesn't?
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. - Albert Einstein
The question should be ..
What is the compelling user experience that would be enabled by 3D?
And what do you really mean by 3D? Do you mean projections onto a 2D surface of a 3D model? Or do you mean something like the spinning displays that render voxels that you can actually walk around? Because a genuine, cheap, ubiquitous 3D display would open up all sorts of possibilities.
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Why should take off? What's the drive behind it? What need does it satisfy?
I sold medical hardware through the web using a 3rd party plug-in 10 years ago, and it was wow. Here is a small list ....or lets face it the only really one. SHOPPING, no more multiple static views of item.
Education - Planetary Systems, Engines, Inside Human Body
Lets Break out of 2D - Streetview 3D...or walk where it is unsafe...Warzones, Mars...or even oil rigs safety training
As I said I did this years ago for a company, it looked great, but it was a clunky implementation.
I guess you might be stating my opinion; but my thought is why? What is the 3d web going to give me that 2d doesn't?
It might be helpful to consider an analogy: "What is the 3d desktop going to give me that 2d doesn't?".
The first stab at '3d web', the ghastly VRML horror, is very similar in spirit to the various abortive attempts at creating '3d desktop' graphical shells. As it turns out, this is an area where you are lucky to break even with what you are trying to replace, and epic failure is the rule. Such attempts have largely died, and deserved it.
'WebGL'(as its name suggests) is much more closely aligned to '3d desktop' in the sense of 'people writing programs for this platform can expect OpenGL and/or Direct3d to be available to their programs if they want it'. This has proven to be enormously useful: lots of applications are simply impossible in anything approaching real time on affordable hardware with a pure-software render path, and the bad old days of having one variant for 3dfx/Glide, one for software, one for openGL, and possibly one or two others for oddball losers like 'S3 METAL'.
If you fundamentally don't like this 'web-app' stuff, you won't like it any more once OpenGL ES is given javascript hooks and set loose upon the world. However, the ability to deploy as 'web-apps' applications that require 3d capabilities has the same basic set of use cases as deploying 3d applications as native binaries.
Only if whatever solution is medically certified - my wife can view MRI's at home with full 3D capability using the supplied viewer, it just has a huge warning blazoned across it that says "this device is not certified for medical diagnostics".
The systems she uses in the hospital for viewing MRI scans on have very high resolution screens that are colour matched regularly.
The demand will continue to be weak, though, perhaps forever, and for good reasons.
3D is compelling in entertainment, but the amount of 3D entertainment media/downloads is but a tiny fraction of 2D because demand is small.
Yes, it's compelling for modeling, be it architectural, artistic, design, engineering, medical holography, and so forth. But from the beginning of recorded history, we've successfully distributed and used 2D. That's because the added information in the 3rd dimension is useful, but in a movie or a picture, I don't need to see what's behind the tree. I don't care. There is reason in some cases, and we've evolved those cases, to give dimensionality as needed information. Otherwise, it's unnecessary and comes at an extra cost of codifying it, and storing it.
3D is cool, no doubt about it. Immersive stuff is great. You're not going to find it on a box of CornFlakes, or as content in a James Patterson novel, or an Annie Leibovitz photo of Beiber.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.