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Is a 3D web more than just empty promises?

Paul Festa and John Borland CNET News

Published: 19 May 2005 11:55 BST

How does Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia bode for 3D?
It's obviously a boost for multimedia in general. You have two powerhouses getting together with serious multimedia tools, one coming from the document print world, the other from the interactive CD-ROM world, trying to make the Web a broadcast medium. That's huge. It's continued evidence that Macromedia is relevant as a business, that this is not a sideline to information technology or the Web. More and more, it's going to be the main gig on your computer. So to me, that's all goodness.

But isn't there a tension between Adobe's vision of the world and what Macromedia is trying to do?
Yes. Is the WYSIWYG document culture of Adobe going to win, or the interactive broadcast culture going to win? Typically in these mergers, one culture is going to win out. Do you think they are going to be able to maintain their separate identities? I'm doubtful.

As for 3D, I don't believe they can ignore it. Will they embrace open standards? We've seen a glimmer of open-standards friendliness with Adobe and their support of SVG, but those days might be over now that they own Flash.

What's your opinion of Avalon?
At the risk of sounding too technical, it's BS 3D. You can drop in a cube or a sphere and drop some video on it, and they're calling that 3D. If you want to develop any kind of 3D that has complex objects or behaviours or a rich 3D environment, what they don't tell you is that you then have to write code to that. You're basically writing C# or C++.

Microsoft pioneered a lot of the 3D technologies you say have prepared the Web for this 3D explosion. They created DirectX, Direct3D. They have the Xbox. What's to keep them from putting that technology into Avalon?
I can only assume it's internal politics keeping that from happening. I can't see it happening any time soon. You have to give Microsoft credit for one big thing: They are very focused. They want to win at this console market. Why would they distract themselves with this market that's going to take five years to blossom? By the time this becomes a mainstream phenomenon, they can buy their way into it or build it then. They're taking minimal baby steps to say they're doing 3D, but it's not real 3D. So if there is going to be any relevance to Avalon, they need X3D to succeed.

Aren't open source gaming engines one of your biggest competitors?
From a technology standpoint, the most significant competition would come from open source gaming engines, because the technology is the most similar to what we have in Flux. It's about real-time objects animating, moving, about fancy rendering techniques and being able to interact with them. Those engines, traditionally, have not been packaged to be deployed on the Web. They've been 20MB or 30MB downloads, though that's changing. It's also a business model issue. They're developing games and the engines to support the games. You don't have a motivation for development of this kind of content on the Web. If there were a freely available open source or open source-based ubiquitous playback engine that did 90 percent of what the commercial ones do, you'd see a lot of development directed there.

But if an open source game engine took off, that would be the real competition.