Bringing Online Shopping Into the Future With the 3D Web 70
An anonymous reader writes "While there is now the possibility of using 3D in the browser over WebGL, it is still hard for regular web developers to get 3D content into websites without being hardcore graphics programmers. XML3D, a project at the Intel Visual Computing Institute, tries to tackle that problem by having a very easy-to-use language as an extension of HTML5. The goal is to standardize it with the W3C. There are already modified Firefox and Chrome browsers that support XML3D natively. At Intel's Research Blog you can find a video on what shopping at an online store could soon look like. In the example, the user purchases a DSLR that can be fully interacted with in 3D, including attaching various lenses and an external flash."
Re:Yay (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. This adds nothing to VRML (Or any of the other dozen 3D web technologies that went under this same headline in years past.)
Okay, that's not entirely true. Over the past it has the following advantages:
- It's buit into the browser, so no plugins.
- Computers are much faster so performance should be better.
- Bandwidth is higher so files transfer faster.
But none of the gets to the heart of the problem with 3D:
- 3D artists are much more expensive than a production artist running Photoshop and creating attractive 3D content takes much longer than a flat image. This makes the content much more expensive to produce.
- The quality is not there. If you want to show off the highest quality vision of your product you want Photoshoped images. 3D just doesn't have it. Even with high resolution 3D scanners and hours of cleanup by a train artist it will still look sub-par compared to properly prepped 2D images.
- There are very few 3D interface designers worth a damn. And they're all working much higher paid jobs making games. That leaves people who sort of saw a scene in Jonny Mnemonic on late-night TV years ago when they were a little drunk, and thought it would be neat to make an interface like that. This turns away customers. And even if they did hire one of those great designers away from the games industry, 3D is still a horrible interface for a 2D spreadsheet, which is what most web sites are.
- Phones.
With the exception of the last, these problems will always exist, and always doom the 3D web.
The single case I've seen for 3D web in 20+ years of doing 3D are online 3D libraries like Thingiverse [thingiverse.com] where, in this case, you can preview an STL before downloading.
Disclosure: I have worked with web and 3D since 1996 and have been directly involved with a number of doomed 3D web projects in that time. They were all essentially identical with the exception of the name of the 3D plugin/file format.
Second Life tried this (Score:5, Informative)