What you are talking about are the ‘genre’
of 3D as Eric Maranne puts it. It is important to distinguish these
in the market and in your products. What you call ‘sims’,
is also referred to as ‘virtual reality’ and that is a better term
because it opens up more content potential. You may not be simulating
anything. One common feature I find among people who are good at
that genre is they all seem to have a background in theatre. It is
theatre tech in pixels. It may not be a metaphor or it might.
Visualization is distinct in that it
really is strictly metaphorical and that is one market that tends to run out of
steam because a metaphor is only as useful as it is easily comprehended and far
too many of the common practice visualizations take experience to comprehend
even if they are great eye candy. But the common functions for transformation,
rotation and zooming work. The distinguishing quality of 3D is
whether it is static or real-time. Real-time does not mean ‘animated’.
It helps to understand the difference between say a ‘frame-based’
animation (think datasets for interpolators) and script-generated motion (think
motion and direction vectors being determined by a script that uses rays to
determine the classes of objects in proximity). In X3D, mastery of
the sensors is the first level to developing convincing scenarios because they principally
determine what goes on vis a vis the user’s position, not among objects
in the scene.
I’m not sure what you mean about ‘world
views’ and X3D being a problem. That is actually one of
its strengths if I understand you. X3D works great. It is not just
VRML. BTW, a good book is coming out in April from Don Brutzman and
Leonard Daly.
As with HTML, X3D is a hypermedia wrapper
language. Unlike HTML, it is a bit lower level. View source
helps but not nearly as much as it does with HTML. Cutting and
pasting out of transforms can lead to bizarre results because of accumulations
in nested 3D coordinate systems such as scaling. To create
presentations, you have to think about time, location and orientation in ways
that are unfamiliar to page builders. You may also, as in MU ( the
multi-user variation for VR), have to consider what the presentation is with
multiple users roaming it at the same time interacting with the environment.
What happens if proximity sensors are live and trigger behaviors when you are
attached to a camera in motion? Do you animate the camera at the
same time? Where do you go if a viewpoint is unbound (it pops the stack,
but what was the last viewpoint selected and does that shock the monkey)?
How do you route an event among different worlds that are composited
into a main world (the most common way to build)? Is it better to use inlines
(easy) or protos (flexible and the real component level for builders)? Protos
are better because inlines are event-opaque.
What we learned over the last decade of
working with 3D on the Web is that the simpler languages (eg, 3DML) are easy to
start but not powerful enough once past basic scenes. X3D/VRML is
harder but at the sweet spot of power and ease. There is no free lunch
here. More can be done with high level languages and syntax transforms.
Ajax3D works but it always did.
It is a real non-linear
system. It is easy to think ‘this is just games’ but
that is just a genre and as with any genre, it has its own constraints (why are
so many games in closed spaces even if they don’t appear to be closed,
for example)? Each genre has its own vocabulary.
The amount of academic BS there is very deep and mostly useless. Because
the basics are basic, all of the meaning is in the expression.
It might be good for those of you who are
interested in X3D to spend some time on the X3D-Public mail list and learn what
is of concern to developers there instead of trying to invent something here on
XML-Dev. The potentials are enormous but the learning curve is
steep, there are a lot of people who are well ahead, and it is truly a very
time consuming art form and technology to do good work in much less cutting
edge. If you just want to do 3D, yes, work with OpenGL and good luck.
Just keep in mind: this isn’t HTML and it never will be. That’s
not a slag on HTML; it is a very different medium and the skills you learn
building pages are not very useful except for Javascript.
BTW: want a good cheap editor?
Flux Studio (Media Machines) is free for personal use. Blender is
free but has a steep learning curve. OTOH, it can do anything.
If you want to play with Boolean carving, check out the ISB demo from Parallel
Graphics. The Flux viewer is open source. The Xj3D
libraries (Java) are open source.
len
-----Original Message-----
From: Kurt Cagle
[mailto:kurt.cagle@g...]
Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007
8:50 PM
To: david.lyon@p...
Cc: xml-dev@l...
Subject: Re: 2007
Predictions - losing the PC
3D
makes sophisticated 2D possible. Apple proves this daily - and most of the core
changes occuring on the Linux and even MS side visually are due to the
integration of 3D processes into the daily workflow. Sure, many of them are
just "effects", but its remarkable how effective those effects can be
for making metaphors believable.
With 3D there are effectively two metaphoric systems at play. The first is the
Sims reality - Second Life, et alia. This is the walkthrough model of the
universe, you are in the perspective of the world, and it is what people
commonly conjure to mind when they bring up "3D". Cool, processor
intensive, and difficult to do without specialist tools - though even that's
not that big a deal any more. Spend some time looking at http://renderosity.com; admittedly a lot of crap,
but a fair amount of just jaw-droppingly stunning work done largely be artists
who wouldn't know a for(){} loop if it bit 'em on the ass. This is where the
reality is moving towards - learn to render static, then learn to animate, then
learn to build worlds. The GIS folk are there big time with this, they
understand that the world is three dimensional, and they consequently must be
as well if they are to survive in the next generation.
The second metaphor is more subtle - it is the mathematical domain that 3D
opens up; fractally effects, vapors, applications that are able to twist and
distort and reform because they are rendered onto a mathematically complex
domain. The 2D desktop's not going away, but the ability to organize in 2.5
space (i.e., z-ordered content, not something with a fractal dimension of 2.5)
is significant, even with a static viewpoint. Data visualization comes from
this, and data visualization is frankly the great unexplored world where XML
should, by all rights, excel. Why? Because data visualization typically
requires the ability to transform content on the fly, sometimes radically so,
with the presentation layer being built in ways that can't necessarily be predicted
a priori. XML is superb at that, whereas related technologies such as Flash are
only good so long as you stay within the fairly limited confines of what a
packaged toolset can provide.
This is really where I see the crux of X3D, and where I think the hard won
lessons from SVG really do apply. SVG is a favored technology in GIS, because
of that malleability, but outside of that fairly narrow domain, there were too
many different people that wanted to stretch SVG too many different ways to
truly become useful, often attempting to make it into something it wasn't. I
think that because of the parsing issues and constraints on the X3D model wrt
world views, trying to build #1 in X3D will likely be an interesting exercise
but something that may take 5-10 years of technology coming to fruition to make
pervasive. If you look at the low hanging fruit, though - data visualization,
largely planar structures (architecture) and so forth you can get a lot of
mileage from X3D.
On 1/17/07, david.lyon@p...
<david.lyon@p... >
wrote:
re:
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/apple-profit-rises-78-ipod/story.aspx?guid=%7BCCF6CF6B-D2C6-435B-A5B2-E6D92872F777%7D
To quote:
"Macintosh computer sales also surged, rising 40% to $2.4 billion,
while Mac shipments rose 28% to 1.61 million units, more than double
the growth of the overall PC market. The Mac results were a slightly
below many analysts forecasts, as several had expected Apple to sell
between 1.75 million and 1.8 million Macs during the quarter."
Using OpenGL I'm sure has had something to do with it....
Obviously people like this stuff...
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Kurt Cagle
http://www.xforms.org