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Is a 3D web more than just empty promises?

Paul Festa and John Borland CNET News.com

Published: 19 May 2005 11:55 BST

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This would be Joe Firmage. The last thing CNET reported about that was that he'd bought Media Machines.
This was back in the summer of 2003, and we had signed a letter of intent for the acquisition. After several delays, due to logical reasons, both parties concluded we should stay as independent entities. But they're one of my top customers. They're licensing the Flux technology for distribution, and they're using it for the 3D content engine for their rich media portals.

So one thing we're seeing in very immediate steps is serious early adoption.

What do you mean early? It's been 10 years.
It means it's not someone kicking the tires anymore. They're deploying it, they're buying it, they're doing something with it. We're past the demo stage, but we're not seeing widespread adoption yet.

This is the third swipe at this. The first was VRML, which was too much too soon. We had visions of all these different applications you could build with the technology — many of which are now being deployed — when computers didn't support 3D. The software libraries you needed weren't installed, so along with the 2MB download of (Intervista Software's 3D player) WorldView there was 10MB of DirectX and Direct3D to install — over a 28.8 connection.

Now everyone has 3D on board if they bought their machine anytime in the last four years. And now you have the bandwidth; you have broadband.

There have been several proprietary formats for 3D on the Web, like Macromedia's Shockwave 3D and Adobe's Atmosphere. What happened to those?
They were too little too late. In 1999, the Internet bubble was in full swing, and the multimedia giants introduced these extensions to what they already had. Times were good, it was the middle of bubble, budgets were big, and people had time to look at those things. But the technologies were pretty limited. They were weak, not as fully functional as VRML.

So that's the too little. The too late was that Internet bubble burst and those budgets just evaporated. The foundations of those businesses went away.

Now we're in a position where the timing couldn't be better. Every user has a computer that has 3D. Most people download some kind of game, or download music, or download a chat client — things that are outside the sphere of the Web browser. Right now we have these proprietary, 3D gaming universes, 3D chat worlds, like Linden Labs' Second Life, and they're analogous to the Prodigy and Compuserve of a decade ago.

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