Ubiquitous 3D

Tuesday, July 27, 1999 - Better than VRML

First, a quick review of what happened in the VRML world over the last two years.

A company called Platinum Software (they make accounting software) bought both Intervista and Cosmo, the two main companies making VRML browsers.

Their intent was to grab all the technology and tools to support it (Cosmo had some good tools while Intervista had the better browser IMHO) so they could create a ubiquitous platform for displaying 3D content over the World Wide Web. As near as I can tell, Platinum is primarily interested in displaying financial data in web browsers and want to make it as simple as possible to do so.

While it seems that Platinum has pretty much purchased control of the VRML world in fact I don't think it's that bad. In fact, they have announced a plan to convert the VRML player source code into "open source."

I believe they really do want to make 3D ubiquitous.

At any rate, you can still get VRML browsers for free, so who cares. Microsoft did in fact make Intervista's browser available for Windows 98 although I'm not sure if it shipped on the CD or is only available from http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com .

But I recently received an amazing technology demo from a company called Brilliant Digital Entertainment (which appears to have Sega as a significant investor!). Jed Fisher, a long time reader of my columns, alerted me to the existence of BDE (an Australian company). I followed the link and downloaded a demo and I was impressed! Jed also sent me a couple of full length "Multipath Movies" on CD. One was based on Xena and the other on Ace Ventura, Pet Detective. (You can download the demos by clicking here. You need to download the Multipath Movie "Digital Projector" first.)

Jed made the claim that BDE had developed something better than Floops ... that got my attention! Because Floops is great! Two years later the kids still like to watch him.

I tried out Xena first. The production values are amazing! The entire movie is approximately 100 megs long and lasts about an hour! They've got sets! They've got lighting! They've got amazing special effects! They've got morphing! They've got cool camera moves! Wow!

It turned out I didn't get to watch all of Xena because it scared one of my kids when a creature got hacked by Xena and then healed itself back up.

So I switched over to Ace Ventura. Ace's production values aren't as high as Xena but they definitely captured Ace's movement and style.

After awhile my kids got used to Xena again and now they ask me to put it on for them. They watch it just like a TV show.

The only problem I have technically with the MPM experience is that sometimes characters feet aren't always anchored to the floor. Historically, that's always bugged me about any interactive animation. I used to jump around at Virgin crying "no sliding feet!"

Another minor problem - a marketing problem - is that I wish Xena wasn't quite so realistic. This stuff is definitely targeted at kids and in the modern era young kids get exposed to things about four years younger than they used to, so it would be better if the content scaled down all the way to four year olds.

I have to congratulate BDE for getting so much content into such a small space ... and for the quality of their mocap and animation. And for the quality of the whole integrated experience. Assuming Sega still has their hooks into this, it's easy to imagine this content showing up on a Dreamcast machine and looking great. In fact, I hope something like that happens, because it expands the audience for interactive entertainment.

It's free to try out. Note that the demo files are fairly sizeable (1 or 2 megs or so), although there are also some short character vignettes that are 100K - 200K in size.

Have fun!