[thelist] Whatever happened to VRML?

viveka me at karmanaut.com
Mon Mar 12 21:29:23 CST 2001


>At 2:23 PM 3/10/1, Naju V wrote:
>>   what's the current state of 3D Animation in webpages?
>
>A little difficult at the moment, but there's great promise in the near-term.
>
>Defining a file format is one thing, but getting predictable rendering out
>there in the world is another issue entirely....
>
>This spring the Shockwave Player will be adding an auto-update for realtime
>3D rendering. The interactivity will be contained within the same engine,
>avoiding browser dependencies such as the Java-based EAI.

I've seen the Shockwave 3D stuff (there was a demo
at the MacWeb3D BOF at SIGGRAPH 2000), and I was
impressed, even at that stage. It's for Shockwave
though, not for Flash? I'd love to see interactive 3D
inside Flash as well. I used to do a fair bit of Director
work, so I'm a fan of Shockwave - but what's the install
base like, compared to the Flash install base?

Can you give us any details on authoring? Are 3D
animation functions going to appear as an extra set
of tools in Director?
And where will the 3D models come from? Import of
standard formats, or will we need to have 3D Studio
Max, like you do for Viewpoint .mts and Vecta3D?

Medium-to-long term, i feel that VRML has the
momentum, flexibility and open-standards power to
0wn Web3D, but Shockwave 3D stands to be a
very fun toy. I wanna play ;)

Regards,

V.
-- 
|  Viveka Weiley, Karmanaut.	 http://www.karmanaut.com
|  hypermedia :: virtual worlds :: human interface :: truth :: beauty
|  http://www.planet-earth.org :: http://www.MacWeb3D.org
|  http://www.sydney.siggraph.org.au





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