The primary issue that most folks allude to is delivering realistic objects and scenes to end users. Typically folks equate realism with immersion, presence, and as driving emotional connections. Once realism is by default the goal, technologies quickly get rated by their ability to construct, support, and deliver it. This use of realism as defacto end goal of engineers is not surprising (and yes realism also a very wrong-headed end goal for content creators, realism is just a tool used to achieve truer goals like an emotional connection, realism because its just a tool can be discarded, when needed)

The proof lies in the development of a previously “new media” – filmmaking. It took roughly 20+ years, for film engineers (SMPE) to understand that narrative, not realism, was the driving force behind cinema. Today then we seem to be reliving Bazin’s “Myth of Total Cinema”. As for the future, well, many people do talk about stories & narratives, but technically we don’t even have a equivalent form for “montage” – the unreal cutting and positioning of images. (In fact most people have forgotten just how unreal tv & cinematic visuals are). The new issue of physical interactivity (as opposed to the mental interaction of film) leads to issues of usability. 3D, by virtue of its free explorability, conflicts with most interface design practices.

Interestingly we see academic discourses – narrative and usability as separate and expressed a enivronments (which hold narratives) and interaces (which deal with usability) There is no conversation about combining these forces, the notions of interfaces and environments. We often see in books and conferences the separation, the definition of one or the other – but never what they mean in combination.

so how might the discussion change?
(certainly not by this rant-like posting)

Decades ago the Classic Hollywood style arose and shaped filmmaking, and now on the same lines Game companies seem to be leading the economic charge and by default changing the grounds for “legitimate discourse”, if you wish the ponder the future – videogames (while not “THE” future) are widening the discussion and on the fringes of that discussion look for works on the usability of video games. From there we’ll get to talk about blending interfaces and environments…

hmm, there’s more to said, but by now you either get or you don’t. If not, I’m sorry…if you want more – ie pictures, works, and working examples of a possible future I know where they can be found, regards Steve Guynup, steve_guynup@hotmail.com, web3D old timer…

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…

We are the people behind a lot of COLLADA plug-ins and libraries, including the Max translator being referred to. Previous versions were indeed hard to get to work, because we were dependent on an Autodesk library (3dxi) which we were not allowed to redistribute with our free plug-in. We have since removed this dependency. The plug-in now comes with a simple installer, all you need to do is click Next three times. If you have a further issues do not hesitate to contact us directly: http://www.feelingsoftware.com.

Christian

3D Nature has now published an example KMZ file showing off how its exported 3D trees look in Google Earth 4, using COLLADA. These trees are “crossboards”, Xs of two transparent 2D tree images: Google Earth 4 does render these……

mmm, mesh tech is not slow as it can include the operating system (obdc to ZAMAL-vista), most commercial win software is based upon obdc technologies.

u3d is a hardware standard to allow mesh and other streaming types to combine data at run-time – the system fails because it requires hardware provision but the ideal lives well, as do the examples I have seen of its use.

x3d has the ability of mesh systems in that apache or other services support the operation of data/bit transfer

good interview, thanks

Check your browser, your phone, your home-entertainment center or game console, the servers you get your content from, the latest version of Google Maps, even some big MS website (i believe Windows Live).