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posted by Editor on Monday September 17, @11:32PM
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This editorial by Bruce Damer presents some viewpoints on why VRML failed to take off. Some of the issues raised include the following:
- VRML was aimed at technical specs, rather than what users really wanted
- VRML tools are not optimized for ordinary users to make 3D, and thus do not appeal to a large content community
- Multi-user capabilities in VRML were not treated as a priority, when 3D content creation is more successful with a collaborative approach (he calls Active Worlds a rare success story in online 3D content)
- VRML was not optimized for low-bandwidth use, when most users continue to use dial-up connections
You may or may not agree with these points, but they provide a good starting point for discussing how web-based 3D content can be driven into the mainstream.
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I can't think of any web content that would be better represented in 3d than 2d - other than images of things which are themselves three-dimensional, like street layouts. Can you?
--
Ed Avis
Finger for PGP key
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All his points are correct, as far as they go. However, what he ends up saying is that VRML doesn't go far enough, not that there's anything fundamentally wrong with it.
VRML doesn't have visual authoring tools? So write some. VRML isn't focused on multi-user? Form a working group. Write some code. Do It Yourself, building on the open standard.
The main problem is that these issues are primarily of interest to non-code-writers; so the DIY approach doesn't work as well. Like the lack of UI innovation in Linux; UI just isn't interesting to many coders.
The answer though is not to split the community, as Bruce surely is noticing by now; I'm a member of the Contact Consortium, and on the o-worlds list that he mentions, and the list traffic is almost non-existent.
Bruce has now gone on to throw his lot in with Adobe and Atmosphere; personally I find Atmosphere very dull, as it's:
1. proprietary and
2. not very deep or extensible.
Blaxxun Contact is multi-user VRML, and Blaxxun's focus is entirely on multi-user. I wonder why Bruce never showed much interest in their efforts? They don't interest me because they rely on proprietary extensions to VRML (which could be open if Blaxxun would release their specs, but their business model prevents this), and because they only run on Windoze. These issues evidently don't bother Bruce, since ActiveWorlds and Atmosphere are closed and Windows-only. Parallelgraphics, the new young gods of VRML, have a multi-user extension of their own, called Islands. Also Windows-only, so I don't know how good it is. And then of course there's DeepMatrix/v-net - open source, open standard cross platform multi-user VRML.
{ hypermedia, virtual worlds, human interface, truth, beauty }
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