My thread title is self-explanatory, I think. Just a few years ago you heard all the pundits in Wired talking about the 3D Web, the game systems were adding VR gloves and helmets and books on coding VRML were flying off the computer-book shelves at bookstores.
Everyone said they were just waiting for broadband, then we’d be spending half our lives virtually a la William Gibson.
Today, we’ve got broadband, but those VRML books are remaindered and VR helmets are selling for twenty bucks on eBay.
It turns out (hyper)text is a pretty good way for people to transfer information. For the most part, there isn’t much need for a 3d interface on the web.
It should be noted that there is a genre where multiuser 3d environments are the norm - games. They work there, and they do it well.
I don’t know why there aren’t more vrml campus tours and things like that, except perhaps the authoring is too much effort for the return. I had a vrml world a few years ago, mostly for novelty. I hand coded it, like I do all my web stuff, and it’s just a big pain in the ass compared to knocking out a webpage with a few pictures on it. Sure, we’ve got the bandwidth and the processing power to do it, but getting the info up there in the first place just doesn’t seem worth it.
VRML is a great example of a technology that solves a problem no one needed solving. Like many trends in IT, it was seen as a potential solution to every presentation problem imaginable. However, good interfaces are minimal interfaces and most people don’t need 3-D environments to read today’s news when plain text will do. VRML has it’s uses, though - Geospatial data analysis and CAD are the only practical applications I’ve seen use this technology.
We’ll probably have a similar conversation about XML a few years from now …
Three-dimensional worlds will almost certainly become a reality in the next 10 years; witness the evolution of the gaming community in the last five. VRML is now largely defunct (I don’t believe anyone builds web browsers that support it anymore, and I believe the body that governed it is pretty much dead). Early on, most VRML stuff was pretty basic (square “room”, you move around [slowly], occasionally click on a link). THe thing was, computers couldn’t handle the 3D (none of this was hardware accellerated), and most internet connections couldn’t handle the amount of data that would be required to put together a really nice VRML site. I say give it time; VRML may be gone (perhaps temporarily), but something will come along to take its place, eventually.
Another factor in the failure of VRML was Quicktime VR. It was photo quality 3D and could be generated pretty easily from still photos, which were (and are) 2 killer advantages. It turned out that most things that people wanted to have 3D viewing of actually existed already in reality. VRML was easy to generate if you had a 3D model, but building the 3D models was never easy.
Although always-on connections and high-speed connections might be the norm in the US, don’t assume they are in the rest of the world. In the UK they majority of users still have 56k dial-ups (this was also the case in Australia the last time I was there) and metered local telephone calls.
The rest of the world won’t be embracing VRML in a hurry until we speed up and cut costs, and I imagine this lack of an international market is also a disincentive to development companies.
Mark Pesce, one of the ?inventors?/?founders?/?creators? of VRML wrote in his book <I>The Playful World</I> that people who spent significant time inside VR apparatus such as goggles, etc. developed some kind of disturbing perceptual problem. IIRC, he was kind of vague on what exactly the problem was, but it was enough to suspend development on home VR systems at some company he was working it. Argh, I wish I could recall clearer details.
Of course it will be porn. Porn seems to a driving force in just about any medium that contains pictures.
I recall reading an interview with the ‘King of Web Porn’, whose name I cannot even come close to recalling and doesn’t really matter anyways. He was talking about movies and streaming and how he had this ‘marvelous insight’ when he first saw it that there would be a market for streaming porn. The reporter fawned a little and wrote some fluff about ‘market insight’ or some other such nonsense.
My first thought was “Duh.” EVERYONE I knew could see that movies and streaming video had PORN written all over them from Day 1.
Discussing this, Dennis Miller once said something like, “A system that allows an unemployed steelworker to sit in his recliner with a beer in one hand and the remote in the other and feel as if he’s making love to Claudia Schiffer will make cocaine look like Koolaid.”
Nah. It’s violence. There are already tens of thousands of people online at any given moment shooting each other in the virtual head in games like Quake and Unreal.
A big part of the problem with VRML is that it wasn’t a particularly good way to define a dynamic virtual world. It worked okay for specifying a collection of static models, but if you wanted to have them move around and change there were much better ways to organize the data.
Another problem with VRML is the lack of easy editing tools, and the lack of modelling talent in the world. It takes skill to build a 3-D world, or even a 3-D user interface. Very valuable skill.
Look at Flash. It’s a lot easier to use than VRML, and has some pretty good editing tools for building flash animations. So it’s WAY over-used. If I have to sit though another flash animation before I can enter someone’s web site, I may go insane.
I thank God that VRML didn’t take off. If it had, then every 2-bit website would force me to have to navigate some damned 3-D maze or something just to find out today’s sports scores.
Fiver, I strongly suggest that you check out ActiveWorlds, which is a huge, somewhat successful 3-D community on the Web that has been around for years. Their software will let you browse through and chat with people, tour their homes, etc for free, and if you register you can change 3-D Avatars, start building a house of your own, etc. It is far and away the best thing using 3-D on the Web anywhere, for any price, IMO.
Let me know what you think. I’ve taken a couple Dopers out there on a tour in the past, and they were very impressed.
Active Worlds, and also Outer Worlds use the same browser engine, and server application. They are not the VRML worlds that the worked with Internet Explorer.
I would recommend these two VR communities to anybody. Outer World even has live audio broadcasts and all the worlds are on one sever, allowing for financial transactions.
