http://delicious.com/web3d4u
The following are solely the comments of Will Rourk and not of Inform magazine
There are a lot of things that got cut from the article that are interesting to Web 3D development today. I think a lot of the academic explorations into Second Life, though not so apparently useful right now, are a really great direction to be heading so that when ubiquitous 3D technology has become friendly enough and easy enough to implement, some of the core issues of pedagogy will have a solid base from which to germinate. I'm hopeful that sites like http://slarchitecture.ning.com/ will actually garner more discussion and traffic that may help provide a basis for useful implementation of Web3D technologies. The architectural community will provide the experimenters and conceptual developers of a spatial presence delivered via networks whether it is the Web or whatever comes next. It's what we do as a group of people devoted to directing our thoughts and attitudes toward spatial immersion.
Being an historian, I also wish that I could have expounded further on the history of Web 3D. I was there in 1996 when we built crude spatial simulations for Netscape and Internet Explorer with VRML, the Virtual Reality Modeling Language. A lot of time, money and enthusiastic energy was poured into this technology to make into a really great, easy to use and implement script for rendering places, spaces and objects on your ordinary web browser. But I was also there in Paderborn in 1999 when the powers that fund and sustain technology dropped interest and pulled the plug that kept VRML technologies afloat. There on the cusp of such promise and innovation came the Dark Ages of Web 3D. And we have not fully revived such promise today despite the strong academic interests in Second Life and multi-user Web 3D. VRML and it's successor X3D were purely democratic technologies that enabled free expression and creation of a non-static, mulit-dimensional, interactive network experience at which Second Life really only hints for the user base that it has garnered. If they'd only look back to the era 10 years ago when we could create what we wanted, anywhere we wanted, with tools familiar to 3D artists, rich with interactivity and self expression, maybe they'd see what they're missing and demand what's rightfully (ours). I think that day may come, and maybe even soon, within the next 5-10 years, but only when the world is ready for a real change, a real shift in perception of the democracy of communications and network accessibility.
