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What could you do on a 3D web that wouldn't work in 2D?

By Sean Koehl (Intel) (6 posts) on April 14, 2010 at 3:05 pm

3D seems to be all the rage again since the mainstream success of movies like Avatar and the announcement of multiple 3D TVs for the home at CES a few months ago. Along with the news (and some degree of hype) inevitably comes questions as to how much value 3D really brings, and whether a transition to 3d is as significant as, say, the translation from black & white to color TV and movies.

We have been working on enabling 3D Internet technologies such as ray tracing, virtual worlds, and content creation techniques for several years, and I have been posed questions like this several times in my work as an evangelist for Intel Labs. Last week, Sharon Gaudin from PC World interviewed me on this topic in association with a press event we held in New York which featured a few examples of 3D technologies.

One point I made in this discussion was that the things that will make virtual world apps most compelling won't be 3D versions of things that we currently do in 2D today. They will be things that we can't do at all on current web pages, that will only for the first time be viable when 3D environments are widespread and easy to use. I gave a few practical examples, such as being able to have dynamic, large group meetings where participants can form ad-hoc groups, move into different areas for private sub team meetings, and then rejoin the larger group. This is trivial in a face-to-face environment but harder with traditional web tools. As such, you often need to travel for these kinds of meetings. It's easy in a VW, so you could still stay home and work in your bathrobe. Or being able to play with time -- to take a view of Rome today and turn the clock backwards 100 years or a 1000 years to see the evolution of the city over time. My impression is that this gets even more interesting when you abandon the constraints of "normal" space and time as it works in the real world. Things in a virtual world could have completely different spacial and temporal relationships to each other. Also, you could have completely subjective views -- the same thing could easily be perceived differently by different people (I guess you could argue this does happen all the time in real life—especially in relationships :-).

But, I suspect others might think of much better examples -- perhaps ones already in development or use today. So -- the question I pose to you is: what could you do with the emerging 3D web that wouldn't work at all with traditional internet tools?

Categories: Graphics & Media
Tags: 3d Internet, 3d virtual world

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Comments (2)

April 18, 2010 1:39 PM PDT 3D ftw

3D goggles sell. VRML does not. I suppose it's only a matter of time until Intel realize it and slaps a "3D ready" logo on it's hardware. No matter how silly it might be, it sells.

April 19, 2010 1:25 PM PDT Arti Gupta (Intel) Total Points: 12,295 Community Manager

Playing 3D games like Crysis. Mozilla is actively working in this space too.

Trackbacks (2)

• Visualize this! Michael Gourlay on Fluid Simulation in games – Intel Software Network Blogs
  April 23, 2010 10:17 AM PDT
• Visualize this! Michael Gourlay on Fluid Simulation in games
  April 23, 2010 2:40 PM PDT

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