Joshua Smith is my new standard in low bullshit 3D geeks. In a single interview he hit all the high notes on the sad state of web 3D projects:
On the "3D web as the web in 3D":
I emphatically DO NOT think it is about replacing the whole browser with a 3D interface and stuffing the 2D web onto unreadable perspective-distorted planes in that space. I think that’s just plain dumb.
On 3D integration in browsers:
I suppose in principle it would be nice if they all implemented a standard 3D rendering environment so 3D content on web pages could "just work" without Java or any plug-in. But there are huge problems with that idea in practice. It takes 5-7 years for a browser change to ripple through all the users and become ubiquitous. So anything they do today will only start to be useful in sales & marketing applications sometime mid-next-decade. The only candidate 3D format for them to use is X3D, which is really just VRML with an XML encoding, which is not a rich media format. It’s strictly a 3D format, so the best you could do would be to put a 3D window into an HMTL page. Everyone in the W3C seems to think that integrating content types together is somebody else’s problem. Plus, X3D is way behind on basic Web 3D enablers like streaming textures, so if the browsers all added X3D today, what we would have in 5 years is 10-year-old technology. Not compelling.
On COLLADA:
But COLLADA is still very rough around the edges: google sketchup is starting to flood the market with not-quite-valid COLLADA files (which could lead to a repeat of the whole "it’s wrong, but it works in IE, so it’s right" HTML debacle); installing a COLLADA plug-in to 3DS MAX was about as easy as installing linux without a distro (that is, insanely hard); and the format itself is so tangled with cross references and unstructured tables that the hype about using XSL to convert COLLADA files to other XML representations is clearly coming from people who know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about XSL.
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