Sure! It allows me some time to catch my breath and solidify on what other
people are talking about. :-) As fair warning I'd like to point out that
I'm one of the most anti-VRML people in existence, although I'd like to
think I have good reasons for that. I don't have a corporate stake in the
success or failure of VRML at this time; actually, I see VRML as a
convenient placeholder for other efforts. My objections are primarily
those of the lone researcher, sitting around scribbling furiously in
notebooks, aghast at what the commercial world has delivered when so much
more has been possible. Most of my business-savvy on the subject I've
gotten via the vworlds-biz mailing list. Most of the "commercial big boys"
of Internet VR are on that list, although mostly they just lurk for fear of
revealing secret market strategies. Whereas I've been rather much the
blabbermouth, having no corporate stake to worry about. I've been
participating on the list since its inception 1.5 years ago. Check out my
web page if you want info on how to subscribe. Also very useful is the
WAVE REPORT from 4th WAVE at http://www.fourthwave.com. It is oriented
primarily towards the 3d graphics marketplace, and covers such things as
the various VRML companies that have fired their staff or gone bankrupt.
been and continues to be a weak technology. The main reason is that VRML
has never developed a network protocol, let alone a network protocol
capable of dealing with the low bandwidth Internet + modem environment
found in the home of the average consumer. If you thought downloading web
pages was slow, well, you should see VRML. As the design of VRML was being
publically discussed, quite a number of people stepped forwards with
suggestions about what needed to be done. Somehow the politics blew in
such a way that these ideas didn't make it into VRML. In particular, note
the time-variant protocols available in the erstwhile Microsoft ActiveVRML
API, and the present-day Sun Java3D API. I can't hope to provide a
blow-by-blow of "why" we ended up with a mostly SGI "Open Inventor" derived
vision of distributed VR. I took one look at Mark Pesce's vision statement
in 1994, decided it was stillborn to equate distributed VR to web pages,
and resolved to ignore the whole thing until something showed me better.
The other major flaw of VRML is that has never had a viable business model.
It's a case of a lot of tech-heads making a "gee whiz" product, and
assuming that just because they built it that the masses would come. Is
VRML meant to be just another form of decoration on a web page? If so,
that doesn't solve any of the problems about making money off the web. Is
VRML meant to be a "hobbyist" tool for creating 3d art on the Internet? If
so, there aren't many hobbyists interested in creating 3d art, and the
modelling/authoring tools are rather difficult to use. It's simply beyond
the "futz factor" of the general public, much like programming a VCR. Is
VRML meant to be an architecture for shared multi-user virtual worlds? For
the moment, let's ignore the fact that VRML 2.0 isn't capable of that. How
does a public standard for distributed virtual worlds serve the needs of a
nascent industry, that hasn't even figured out what online services people
will buy, what cost models will work, what forms of community arrangement
are profitable, and what technologies are needed to enable it? The
combined technical, business, and administrative problems of online 3d
Internet services are overwhelming, and it's foolhardy to think that the
VRML standards body can cope with it. Distributed VR is a relatively
unexplored frontier even in *academia*, let alone in the consumer
marketplace. About the only people who even have a grip on what's required
is people who have been doing Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) for awhile, and
that's really only ante-ing up to the problems.
As for social problems. I think it would be more appropriate to have that
discussion in a thread about MUDs. In the MUD universe, there's a history
of material to draw upon. In the VRML universe, there is no such history
because it's not a multi-user technology. For me, one of the biggest
social problems is how to allow people to block out messages and actions
from people they don't want to deal with, without having to kick the
"troublemaker" off the system (= lost revenue), and without having to hire
a bunch of administrators to play "thought police" with what people do
online (= lost revenue, both in paying for administrators and pissing off
your subscribers.) There are technical solutions to the problem, but they
run very *deep* into how you construct the architecture of your virtual
worlds technology. Basically, you have to track the sources of all events,
their destinations, and their history. The "tapestry of causality" that
such a space would engender, would probably be interesting to discuss at
some point.
As for bankruptcies and such. Worlds Inc. went under, was bought by 2 of
their content developers. They weren't exactly VRML, but they were playing
in the same arena. Black Sun recently fired 10 of its 50 employees. I
believe Superscape has fallen on hard times as well. Hmm, this is one time
where I'm wishing my e-mail program had a "Find..." feature, so I could do
a keyword search on "bankrupt." :-)
Cheers,
Brandon J. Van Every <vanevery@blarg.net> DEC Commodity Graphics
http://www.blarg.net/~vanevery Windows NT Alpha OpenGL
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