Ubiquitous 3D

Monday, December 27, 1999 - Ubiquitous 3D

I've renamed this series of columns from "Fun with VRML" to "Fun with Ubiquitous 3D".

"Ubiquitous" is a great word - it means "available everywhere at the same time". Plus it sounds funny. I get embarrassed when I say it out loud.

We've been on the threshold of ubiquitous 3D for about four years now. Each year as new 3D accelerators are introduced the marketing types all claim that "ubiquitous" 3D is upon us.

Each year, hundreds if not thousands of 2D games are released and millions of 2D web sites are created, without any 3D in site (I mean, in sight).

It is finally true though that, at least in the US, you can't really buy a video card that doesn't support some kind of 3D.

Lots of the cards in OEM machines (Dell, Gateway, etc.), support what I like to call Base Level 3D. Base Level 3D - which is quite useful for everything except games - draws polygons for you, and not much more. The characteristics of a base level card are:

Base level cards don't reliably multitexture; don't support very many useful texture formats; usually have a 16-bit z-buffer; and are generally bad for doing cool game-like alpha-blended special effects. They "just" accelerate software renderers.

But you can do lots of useful stuff with these cards, and I would say that next year - four years after these cards became commercially available for PCs, we'll see this level of 3D on every machine you can buy. The reason is that it's not worth it for hardware vendors to make 2D only cards - it's just as cheap to make the 3D card and throw on some extra DRAM.

By extrapolation, we won't see GeForce 256 style rendering become ubiquitous for another four years.

Remember, ubiquitous means "available everywhere all the time", and it basically takes about four years to flush all the old PC hardware out of the systems that use them. Any hardware left is unlikely to be used to even attempt to view 3D.

One holy grail being pursued is ubiquitous 3D on the World Wide Web.

It's another technology that's been pursued for about three years, so in the next year or two we'll probably see it start to show up in lots of Web pages.

Of course, Protozoa, my favorite 3D Web content company, continues to lead the way. Protozoa has introduced "DotComix" where they claim to introduce a new 3D comic every day. That's hard to do creatively never mind the production problems. (My favorite is the "Gates of Hell" series where Gates is portrayed as a standup comic. The performance is sort-of a "Gates meets Woody Allen" kind of thing. Gates is hard to imitate correctly for reasons that I will describe some other time.)

Protozoa remains "technology independent"; they create content using their own tools and then export it to whatever is handy.

There are now several companies offering 3D players for the Web.

I've already talked about Brilliant Digital Entertainment. Here's an article with their CEO about his take on the future of interactive 3D entertainment. BDE has been spending lots of money and making very little - what do you expect for an internet company? But if they can hang in there, I think there is a broadband future for them.

They recently produced a lot of content for a big new site from Warner Bros. - "Entertaindom". The BDE movie player isn't the only player used at Entertaindom. Another player, from Pulse Entertainment, is also used. A few Floops episodes have been ported over to the Pulse player.

Wild Tangent, founded by former Microsoft DirectX evangelist and force-of-nature Alex St. John, also produces a 3D player. The Wild Tangent player supports more interactivity than the other players - actual online games, such as a knock-off of Monster Truck Madness, are downloaded quickly, and become playable as the rest of the download continues.

To get to the ubiquitous stage, the tools need to be much more friendly. I would say that the Shockwave player comes as close to ubiquitous as anything out there beyond the regular browser.

I think, if and when the Shockwave people get around to extending their 2D vector graphics approach to support 3D objects (technically a small thing to do), and integrate it with Director (a harder thing to do), which is used to create Shockwave content, then we'll see 3D in web pages become ubiquitous. And we'll see the end of these start up companies trying to break into the business.

If any of these upstart companies want to get their technology out there as the solution - just as Shockwave is now for 2D animated graphics, then they better start focusing on making tools "for the rest of us". And that is going to be the real hard problem. Because 3D is just lots harder to plan for and manipulate than 2D. Technically, getting the playback you need, is pretty easy these days. But creating the content is pretty hard!

For the next couple of years, at least, content creation is going to remain the domain of specialists like Protozoa, Brilliant Digital Entertainment, and I don't know who else.

And the real prize - of "owning" the 3D Web browser plugin the way Shockwave owns the 2D browser plugin - is going to depend entirely on developing some mega easy-to-use 3D tools. Shockwave wouldn't exist without the hundreds of thousands of people that already knew how to run Director. And ubiquitous 3D won't exist without the Director-like tool that allows someone to come up to speed with 3D in a month or two.

Hey - but at least the hardware will be out there!

[Thanks to Kelly Fansler to giving me the "heads up" on Entertaindom a little before I read about it in the press releases. He also sent me this link: http://www.entertaindom.com/pages/multipath/superman/main.jsp which you can use to jump over to Entertaindom and check out the latest animation from Brilliant Digital using their player.]