Slashdot Mirror
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?"
...it hasn't taken off in TV, video games (how many people with a 3DS just leave the 3D turned off all the time? I do), or even in movies aside from a few isolated successes. Because it's inconvenient, expensive, and doesn't add anything really compelling.
3d hasn't 'taken off' for television or computer games (or really even movies) despite million$ in promotion and efforts to sell new hardware.
3d is really a solution in search of a problem, particularly on the web.
The fact is that 3d today badly suffers from perspective and quality issues, and most consumers see it as pointless fluff.
In my own narrow perspective (see what I did there?) I have minor amblyopia so I TRULY don't care (obviously, I'm part of a small minority with this). I *can* force it so I can see things in 3d without too much effort. Nevertheless, I've occasionally gone to 3d movies and been totally unimpressed.*
*an experience shared by my binocularly-functional friends.
For movies, it's astonishing to me that they'll spend dozens of million$ on meticulous art design and set work to make sure the slightest detail is accurate in a film, and on imax theaters with fantastically comfortable seating and near-perfect sound...and then present it in a format that suffers badly from ghosting, bad lateral/peripheral perspective, and force the audience to watch in tremendously uncomfortable disposable, usually scratched-to-hell 3d glasses.
-Styopa