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In addition, there was a general consensus that--as mobile devices become more sophisticated--the 3D Web would become much more the province of such devices and far less of the kinds of desktop or laptop computers we know today.
During one break in the schedule Saturday, two members of the team producing Croquet, an open-source software platform designed for creating collaborative, multiple-user online applications, showed off their software. And as word spread about the demo, nearly everyone in attendance suddenly scrambled to watch.
Quickly, about 30 people gathered in a tight semi-circle around the two Croquet team members as they showed off the software's ability to let people move in and out of rich virtual spaces easily and with little of the lag and complicated user-interface of virtual worlds like "Second Life."
The demonstration was one of the highlights of a day filled with engrossing conversations, but short on tangible progress toward the road map everyone had come to create.
To some, the format of the event presented hard challenges to achieving the stated goals. But some felt that organizers had gotten it right.
"I'm not necessarily a huge believer in central planning of technological and cultural advances," said Corey Bridges, co-founder of the Multiverse Network, a sponsor of the event. "But happily, that's not what we're doing here. We are identifying areas to explore. We're seeing mountains in the distance and saying, 'There's something there, someone should go investigate it.'"
Bridges also applauded the makeup of the group that had come to the event.
"I think this was a wonderfully diverse and cantankerous group," Bridges said. "I was a little worried that we might get a bunch of starry-eyed people who weren't grounded...(But) we have all learned to temper our enthusiasm with our level-headedness and that is serving us well."
He also cited comments Dyson made as mirroring the feelings many at the event had.
"Esther Dyson wonderfully stood up during the introductions," Bridges said, "and said she has not drunk the Kool-Aid but she was here to see what the flavor of the Kool-Aid was."
Indeed, Dyson said she was somewhat skeptical of what such an event could produce, but added it really depended in large part on how people can work through the problems that they perceive stand in the way of the goals.
"The connections people made here I'm sure will lead to people doing interesting things in collaboration," said Dyson, who writes Release 1.0 for CNET, the publisher of News.com. "But we're not coming together to promulgate a standard. We're trying to get a common vocabulary, a common understanding."
And in the end, that's what the event's organizers were really after.
"I feel that people came and engaged, and that part of it was extremeley successful," said Bridget Agabra, the Metaverse Roadmap's project manager. "Now the hard work begins again. But this is fun because it's content and ideas...When you see the magic (participants) were doing, the magic they were making with their minds, that was brain food for me."
See more CNET content tagged:
organizer, virtual worlds, 3D, Google Earth, R&D
Yeah, that's smart fella.
It would be fun to get a similar group together of people who have actually developed and own real time 3D worlds, both single client side and multi-user server side. I think they possibly know more and have more road experience than most of the list in the 'invitation only' event. But hey, this is the web where one has to steal from the middle gazelle because the top gazelle has too much protection and the bottom gazelle has no stuff.
So now that 3D is hot, the usual suspects show up to tell us who wins and who doesn't, and as usual, few of them are actually in the business. Yep, that's the web: burglary and indulgences.
> together of people who have actually
> developed and own real time 3D worlds
Seems like these people were included. People like Will Harvey and Ralph Koster have certainly been involved with online worlds that had bigger impacts on bigger audiences than anything built upon VRML. I don't mean to diss standards or VRML but there are plenty of good reasons why plenty of people building online worlds would develop their own formats. What would World of Warcraft gain from X3D/VRML?
Cheers,
Mark
helmets, SGI (now filing for bankruptcy), and Snow Crash.
Nothing new but hey, the market is at least a little more matured
to 3d now. A significant portion of people actually HAVE 3d
chips in their computers and broadband hooked up to them..
Rock on I say! Don't get disillusioned just because another two
decades will pass before people start using 3d like we thought
they would in the 80's and were SURE they would in the 90's.
Joe Six-Pack, my brother-in-law (or, is it brother-out-law?) is having enough trouble trying to figure out the difference between 720p and 1080i, and why does anyone need these new-fangled things called HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, when the DVD player he just got seems to put out a "high-death" display just fine, at least on his neighbor's home theater lash-up (JSP is still waiting for the prices of 60+ inch HDTVs to come down to under a month of his pay - although that all goes to his bills as it is, already, so HDTV prices still have a long way to go down, for him). Personally, I won't be very interested until virtual reality (The Metaverse, or whatever other different name it will undoubtedly be called 10 years from now) has reached the level of all-sense, full immersion, via direct brain electro-encephalic input/output, as envisioned in the 1983 movie "Brainstorm" (I just love the scene where the technician is discovered by his wife, repeatedly spasming and completely dehydrated while lying in his La-Z-Boy, after spending the whole weekend alone while she was visiting her mother, hooked up to the machine that's playing back an endless loop of "truly personal entertainment" :) ). I need the SKU for the VR system with the full-resolution Smell-o-Vision and tactile feedback options, please. Oh, and it's gotta cost less than a PSP, much less an XBox, in today's money.
Yeah, except for the massively-distributed interactive on-line gaming niche (which is what this group should have been looking at for indications and warning of what's coming 10 years from now), based on the success of WebVan.com and most of the rest of WebCommerce 1.0 (which was just a leading indicator for the rest of Web 1.0's ultimate performance in getting people living in virtual worlds), I'll put my money on it taking another hundred, if not a few thousand, years of human cultural evolution before brick-and-mortar stores, shopping malls, bazaars, etc., need to start worrying about where this month's rent is going to come from. Until then, average, real-world people are just going to keep squeezing the tomatoes (and melons ;) ), no matter what the eggheads dream up.
All the Best,
Joe Blow
I wrote a blog about this a week ago.
http://www.weblogs.co.nz/?p=45
People go to 3D worlds for the same reasons they go to shopping malls or even brothels: presence and intimacy. Snowcrash got that wrong.
It's just a GUI but a very powerful one. Just don't use it to do what 2D text does better.
I am just waiting for the technology to come to me.
http://www.virtualtopia.com/
Len Bullard also did a story on XML.com in 2003 titled "Extensible 3D: XML Meets VRML" (http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/08/06/x3d.html). Because of that article I recently asked him if he'd do a followup article to Tim Bray's 3DML article...he speaks like he knows 3D stuff on here; if that's the case then do a followup article on 3DML!
2) You mentioned in your request that you have asked another party to do this and I've not heard from anyone about either.
3) I've been blogging my thoughts on 3D spaces at http://lamammals.blogspot.com
That may not be what you are looking for, but time and time again, single sites or products aren't as influential as the generalization. For example, as another poster says, augmented reality is an important application too. That is why I prefer the term 'real time 3D' over 'virtual reality'. That is a better description of the problem domain in that 1) there are no requirements for how real a VR space is, and in fact, it is a good idea to drop some of the realism quotient 2) the key to doing it for some applications (eg, simulation of sensor-laden environments) is to treat the space itself as an intelligent or sensate entity (see tensorWorlds and the discussion of proximity sensors.
I like apps like 3DML because they make it very easy to get into the 3D modeling artform. I prefer languages such as VRML97/X3D because they are not encumbered by patents, they are mature and stable, and as Bob Crispen says, are the optimum set of objects for doing varying kinds of applications. Gavin and Rick and crew did an excellent job of shaving away the rarer object types and coming up with a solid common core. So learning it opens up the 3D modeling talents very nicely.
Again: what we learned in VRML was
1) 3D content is expensive to make.
2) 3D content is expensive to own.
On the other hand, 3D is the best integrating and rendering paradigm for a multi-domain space that fuses different kinds of information simultaneously and dynamically. It pays to understand the implications of real time.
Croquet is very cool too. Watch that space.
that the organizer did not expect this. I'm even more flabbergasted
that he sees augmented reality as a separate category from virtual
reality. All of us are going to have to get over this conceptual
hump. Just think about the way that visual culture is a sort of
virtual element of embodied space. Augmented reality will provide
similar kinds of visual signage. Let's not abandon the body just yet.
Not for another twenty years anyway.
I think its gono come much sooner than that.
A social site like myspace.com but in 3D with your blog, music, etc... and compatible with any actual blog (as it is just HTML based), is already up and running.
See www.my3dspace.com
Sorry if it is only in French for now.
Have a look !
See you online sometime :)
An example of the Abobe app - http://www.thaimusic.net/world/index.html
- by Stephen_Wilson July 24, 2009 8:33 AM PDT
- Why does everyone assume the 3D Web and browsing the internet in 3D must be a virtual world with avatars and chat etc... ?
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(27 Comments)If this was a good thing then all sites would have an integrated chat systems right now. The fact that they don't illustrates that for the majority of sites out there, this is not appropriate.
I think the requirements for a 3D Web / internet start at a much simpler level providing the means to immerse and interact with content in a natural 3D way that is not constrained by how a particular virtual world technology decides to work.
This allows for all manor of uses as rich and varied as the web currently is that include applications & services such as, yes, virtual worlds & social browsing, but also retail, advertising and more abstract 3D navigation of information etc etc etc.....
Ste w
www.lateralvisions.com