When it comes to eye-popping 3-D on the Web, this dog just won't hunt.
But that may be about to change. A new twist on an existing technology, being boosted by the Web3D Consortium, holds the promise of a brighter future. On Wednesday, the group began defining Extensible 3-D, or X3D, a spec for building three-dimensional content into Web sites.
The consortium said that the would-be standard makes 3-D more digestible on the Web.
"[3-D-based applications have] been implemented in a number of different environments, particularly in the academic world and also in government, where you need 3-D visualization of data," said Deepak Kamlani, executive director of the Web3D Consortium. "It hasn't gone fully into the commercial market -- and that's the attempt here: to make it more appealing for the commercial marketplace."
The consortium, comprised of companies including Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Silicon Graphics, and Sony, hopes to finalize an initial "draft standard" for X3D by mid-year.
Several companies are trying to produce specifications for creating 3-D content that will work over the bandwidth-constrained Web. Intel has a 3-D format called MetaStream, as does a new San Francisco-based start-up called Flatland.
So far, as a platform for creating a new, three-dimensional Web experience, success has been spotty, to say the least. But the Web3D consortium thinks it finally has the spec to kick start the proliferation of 3-D worlds and applications on the Web.
The organization, formerly the VRML Consortium, also established the VRML 97 standard, or virtual reality modeling language. That mainstream 3-D format has done best in non-Web and specialized applications, such as academic use.
"The feeling here was that there were three or four applications -- advertising, page animation, e-commerce, product visualization -- where you have a lot of shopping going on. It makes sense to see that [type of Web content] in 3-D," Kamlani said. "The intent of X3D is to address those beachhead applications and provide the tools and capabilities necessary in those environments."
The new spec is essentially a modular version of VRML 97. X3D will include a number of individual specs that will support lightweight 3-D applications on everything from workstation computers to set-top devices.
Initial components of the spec include a light-weight 3-D software engine for rendering images, a platform-independent 3-D file format and integration of the eXtensible markup language, or XML.
The format will also likely seek to establish cross-compatibility with other proposed Web 3-D formats such as Intel's MetaStream, Kamlani said.
