Look! The Future has arrived again!
Only 15 years after I was working at Trenza at build a 3D front end to the Web (wow, somebody is *still* running the website), and only 20 years after we wrote the first draft of VRML (points to Wikipedia for getting the history of the name right), it looks like it is steam engine time for a 3D Web again.
The emergence of the Oculus Rift has gotten some folks at Mozilla experimenting with how you could incorporate a 3D front end to the web experience. We'll see whether they learn from the mistakes of the past. There are good reasons why it didn't take off before, primarily because it's been a solution in search of a problem: far as I can tell, nobody's taken seriously the issue of how to use 3D to *navigate* the Web except Mark Pesce and me.
If I had the cycles, I'd probably be all over this -- after all this time, I *still* have yet to see a good implementation of my Portals proposal for how online 3D *ought* to be structured in the large scale (written almost exactly 20 years ago, and I still think I'm right). But now that the game Portal (and the latest X-Men movie) has taught everybody that non-Euclidean spatial connectivity can be fun, folks might actually be receptive to it...
The emergence of the Oculus Rift has gotten some folks at Mozilla experimenting with how you could incorporate a 3D front end to the web experience. We'll see whether they learn from the mistakes of the past. There are good reasons why it didn't take off before, primarily because it's been a solution in search of a problem: far as I can tell, nobody's taken seriously the issue of how to use 3D to *navigate* the Web except Mark Pesce and me.
If I had the cycles, I'd probably be all over this -- after all this time, I *still* have yet to see a good implementation of my Portals proposal for how online 3D *ought* to be structured in the large scale (written almost exactly 20 years ago, and I still think I'm right). But now that the game Portal (and the latest X-Men movie) has taught everybody that non-Euclidean spatial connectivity can be fun, folks might actually be receptive to it...