Google, Mozilla back 3D interwebs Open-standards industry consortium the Khronos Group is forming a working group meant to bring accelerated 3D graphics to the interwebs. Known as Accelerated 3D on Web, the working group was announced on Tuesday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The goal is to create an open, royalty-free standard that will …
Now instead of wrangling to get multi-browser compatibility in two dimensions, we're gonna have to do it in three because we all know Microsoft will support this new 'standard' in it's own special way... I can't imagine how much fun that will be.
Anyway, isn't this exactly what Flash / Silverlight / Monolight / etc are for?
Are there any worthwhile uses for this, or should I just get squid to block it all?
When Javascript turned up it was a matter of moments before some twat decided that a short script could achieve the same effect as an HTML <a> tag, and immediately started creating web sites that were bloated, slow and could not be viewed on Internet Explorer except in "pants down, bent over" mode (as anything remotely scripted was for many years on IE).
Now we face the prospect of that twat's apprentice deciding that the best possible 3D button look can only be achieved by explicitly scripting the animation of a few voxels (or whatever) rather than just saying "button" and letting the user agent get on with it. We're doomed, I tell you! DOOMED!
So Google and Mozilla feel left out of the RIA party? With Microsoft (Silverlight) and Sun (JavaFX) already trying to duplicate Adobe's RIA technologies, the competition is already pretty stiff.
I guess it will force everyone to improve their offerings which can only be good for developers and eventually end-users (hopefully).
Didn't they try this with VRML/X3D - www.web3d.org - killed by lack of plugins and the difficulties in making the 3D part connect back to the server?
There are applications in medical and scientific visualisation, 3d data visualisation, 3d manuals and training, Second life in your browser etc - but they need to get the infrastructure right.
We still haven't got far with 2D- I suspect some commingling of CSS and SVG will happen at some point and open a lot of doors for designers and for low-bandwidth pages - and it seems to me like it would be more useful to be able to do that well than worry about three dimensions for now.
It's not as though we can't download 3D applications if we want them.
Then again, I'm sure it has potential- after all, look at what a tremendous success VRML was.
This will never really take off for one simple reason: cost.
It's still fairly expensive and time consuming to put together and maintain a decent flat website of any complexity. As soon as you start requiring 3D designers + programmers to make a simple page you'll push the time/cost investment into silly territory.
Not that it may not be interesting and maybe even useful, but it will not be adopted to any great degree.
I know that multimedia features and animation are often abused in irritating ways on the web.
However, if the development of web technology were left up to a load of grumpy old men complaining about the very idea that people might be allowed to make anything pretty then life would be rather sadder.
I hope that this endeavour is successful. There isn't yet a very good option for doing 3d graphics on web pages.
...but I can see some uses for this. My company builds motion platforms, and the ability to do, say, an on-site demo showing the way our cuing software works using a model of the platform would be pretty useful, since not a lot of people will bother downloading and installing an app to do the same thing.
Granted, legit business uses like that may be few and far between, and it might well spawn a thousand horrible "Which spinning cube do I click?" UIs like flash did, but you could say the same about any powerful tool. It'll always be misused by other powerful tools... :P
You're on the right boat mate, but you've forgotten one small thing. Microsoft already have their own 3D standard different to everyone else's - it's called DirectX. So far from supporting this open standard, Internet Suxplorer will *only* work with DirectX, while Firefox, Opera, Chrome et. al. will only work with OpenGL. The practical upshot will be even worse than the IE-detection and CSS-substitution we web developers now employ; a cross-browser compatible 3D website will need to developed FROM SCRATCH in two completely different formats using completely different applications, with two different sets of geometry files, two different sets of textures, and so on.
Of course, since we all know that Microsoft can't even remain consistent to their OWN standards from version to version, we will then need 4 different versions of the site and its geometry and textures for each version of Internet Suxplorer in use, plus a fifth version that supports the OpenGL standard.
Joy. I can't wait. Maybe I'll send a bill to Microsoft for the quadrupling of development time their non-adherence to standards causes!
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