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?"

Comments

Underlying structure versus pretty pictures.

[hessian]

I suffered through the VRML list back in the day when people first wanted to make 3D cyberspace.

There's a conflict: you either model 3D functional worlds, or the underlying structure, or you create a language which can draw things in 3D.

The problem with the latter is that it's not stand alone, but requires people to come up with an intersection of code, resources and aesthetics.

What people actually need is the former, which is the ability to create functional 3D models and describe them in a language like HTML, and have the browser itself create an interactive world from that.

Re:Underlying structure versus pretty pictures.

[DKlineburg]

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?

Re:Underlying structure versus pretty pictures.

[ButchDeLoria]

A replacement for Unity.

Re:Underlying structure versus pretty pictures.

[thomasw_lrd]

Better porn.

Which is of course the answer to any question about when will the web have X? When the porn industry wants to make more money.

Re:Underlying structure versus pretty pictures.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:Underlying structure versus pretty pictures.

[UnknownSoldier]

> What is the 3d web going to give me that 2d doesn't?

At the risk of getting down modded: your thinking is the typical two dimensional can't-think-outside-the-proverbial-box. 3D has a time and a place for certain interactive and educational applications.

To put things into perspective.
http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/stars/

For teaching about the science of waves, caustics, etc.
http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/

For people to explore creativity without needing an over-priced program
http://derschmale.com/demo/farbe/watercolour/FarbeWaterColour.html

For rapid prototyping and fun playing around with shaders
http://www.iquilezles.org/apps/shadertoy/

Just because _you_ can't see a need or use for it does not imply it is useless for everyone else.

Re:Underlying structure versus pretty pictures.

[tehcyder]

How is the porn industry struggling? There will never be a possibility that there won't be people willing to make porn... in multitudes. As a consumer, that seems pretty successful to me

The problem the porn industry has is that you don['t need to be in the porn industry to make porn any more. Also, as there is more free porn on the internet than you can ever do more than skim through, the number of people willing to pay for porn must be pretty small nowadays.

Re:Underlying structure versus pretty pictures.

[Spiridios]

You're still downloading the game and resources, it's just disguised as the startup being painfully laggy, with the added fun of having to download it all again if you want to play on another machine or your browser decides to clean house.

But for the casual gamer, it means going to some website and just playing a game. A "downloaded" game, requires the casual gamer to worry about things like where to save the installer, scanning the installer for evil viruses, running the installer, answering questions like "where to install" and "next". Why do you think Windows and Mac are moving to an app store model? Sure, there's profit, but there wouldn't be any profit if people thought they were no more convenient than downloading from random websites.

Re:Underlying structure versus pretty pictures.

[Ghostworks]

There's no doubt that it's useful for something: the fact that standalone 3D applications exist is proof that it's good for something. And yes, it would be better to have a portable, universally-understood format for those applications to increase the utility of any such program. But that's not the question. The question is why it hasn't taken off for the web. I suggest that it is because 3D graphics can only harm most of the web-browsing experience.

First, recognize that those areas where it is necessary tends to be as embedded media or shareable, free-standing programs. It's good that you can get at them through the web, and it's great that you don't need to install specialized software, but they're not really web-native any more than a form-base calculator or a flash game is web native. It's just something that happens to be served up through a browser.

Second, recognize that the modern web is not 2D. it is more like 2.5D, or perhaps 2.ND for an arguable value of N. Content is not static, but updates (such as this page). Content is tailored to the specific user (such as facebook). Content on even a "static" page now leverages CSS-based drop-down menus, pop-ups, and forms that require user interaction to reveal information that already exist client-side. And these are the successful "2D+" technologies. I won't even touch the unsuccessful ones like entirely Flash-based websites.

We still recognize such things as "pages", and they have enabled new techniques, but there have also been tradeoffs. Some examples:
1) those CSS-based menus now keep you from finding information as quickly as you could have before. On the old web, if I wanted to find a phone number for a particular location of restaurant chain, I could load their page and cnt+F for my area code... and there it was. Now, I can try to use similar means to accelerate the search (cntl+F on "tel", "contact", "locations", etc.), but that will usually only help me find the specific link/menu quicker. In general, I now find the information every bit as slowly as someone who types 20 words a minute and doesn't know cntl+F exists.
2) On the old web, you could bookmark a page and be pretty confident that -- so long as the site itself remained live -- that information would ways be there and associated with that address. Now it is relatively easy to loose track of information unless you save a local copy, even when the information itself is still on the web. (The USPTO website is notorious for this, with it's ASP pages that serve up dynamically-named TIFF images of patents are live for 2 weeks or so.) This loss of functionality began almost two decades ago, so there are many who don't even remember what a reliable web was like.

The modern web is prettier, but also more mouse-dependent, less reliable in terms of finding old data, and a lot more dependent on our feudal web-lord of choice (i.e. Google) to glue the whole damn thing together

So given that we're talking about adding on a new layer of presentation, we have to ask what it would buy us, and what it would cost us, and whether the net would be better off for it overall. First, we'd be able to simultaneously take in a lot more data in one visual slice, but it would be less searchable. It may also only be really useful if each data point is itself visual. It will also be easier to construct pages where some information is pushed to the fore while other information becomes either peripheral, or completely hidden. So what is this good for? Street-view? Sure. Augmented reality? Sure, But we don't really have it yet. Niche content as describe above? Sure, but that's not going to drive the technology of the underlying web.

So let's take another step back. What is the problem that 3D attempts to solve for everyone? I would argue that that problem, by and large, doesn't exist yet. There are two technologies -- 3D printing and Augmented Reality (of the markup-a-picture-taken-with-my-phone variety, not the cyberpunk-HUD-in-glasses variety) -- which could give mor

A better question

[Hentes]

Why should take off? What's the drive behind it? What need does it satisfy?
You can't push out something without a market. Flash created a market for 2D web graphics, and now HTML5 standardizes that based on the experience we had in the Flash years. Unity is doing the same thing for 3D, but it will take a while before 3D on the web becomes common enough to need standardization.

Wrong question

[OzPeter]

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.

Well...I'd hope it better stays away.

[Robert Zenz]

Because people will start abusing the hell out of it.

Fascinating...

[fyngyrz]

Oh, I get it. Like a tesseract. Everyone else sees it as smaller on the outside than it is from your POV.
 

Re:Still Doesn't work in Links

[Mr Foobar]

You're kidding, right?...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser)

Re:Because...

[Trepidity]

I don't think the submitter is asking about the optical-stereo kind of 3d (like what you get with "3d movies" and "3d glasses"), but rather just geometric projections of 3d scenes onto a 2d viewing plane, like you get in Leonardo da Vinci paintings or Quake.

It has alwasy had a market

[tuppe666]

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
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 ....or lets face it the only really one. SHOPPING, no more multiple static views of item.

As I said I did this years ago for a company, it looked great, but it was a clunky implementation.

Please define "gimmick" and "edge cases"

[tepples]

Anonymous Coward wrote:

There are a few tiny edge cases

What's with this recurring meme that I've been seeing on Slashdot lately that edge cases should be ignored? If everybody has his own edge case, then why not allow something that handles all the edge cases acceptably?

but everything else is FPS or gimmick.

True, one of the first video games with a 3D perspective (Battlezone) was the ur-first-person-shooter, but 3D games in other genres have been popular since the mid-1990s. Or is every other video game genre "gimmick" and "few tiny edge cases" to you? I'm not getting what you mean by "gimmick"; in the circles where I hang out, "gimmick" refers to a 2D platformer for the NES published by Sunsoft with a design aesthetic similar to that of the Kirby games.

kind of like 3D tv's

The "3D" in "3D TV" and the "3D" in WebGL are two different things. WebGL just defines a way to project 3D geometry into a display plane. This display plane may or may not be presented with binocular separation, which is what the "3D" in "3D TV" and "Nintendo 3DS" means.

Re:Been there, done that

[Errol backfiring]

But did you ever try to create 3D content?

Yes I did. And it is not that hard either. VRML is a great language, I still want language designers to learn from its event handling system. What killed VRML in my opinion, was that the standards body was taken over by a company that wanted to push its own format. Killed by commerce.

Headache?

[digitalchinky]

Your friendly radiologist would like to be able to solve your head pain by reading your MRI study in 3D without having to pay 6 digits for a PACS viewer. That is one legitimate, if infrequent, scenario where 3D support in multiple browsers would be welcome.

Re:Headache?

[Richard_at_work]

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.

Re:Not in the present crop of browsers, tho

[postbigbang]

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.