3D On The Cheap: You Say You Want A Revolution?

When I was a young musician, I owned a 1966 VW Microbus just like my hero, Arlo Guthrie. As with most trends, a practical reason drove the adoption of cheap technologies: a '66 VW bus had gears on the wheels that enabled a 40hp engine to push a heavy load a long ways reliably. It wasn't fast off the line but it was very cheap. For the young musician starting out, a van that hauled equipment, a bass player and two girls we picked up at the last gig to the next gig, that was a miracle of modern technology and the market.

Today I have less hair, the same bass player, and I married a girl that rode in that Microbus; so, regardless of the zeitgeist, a good affordable technology goes a long way toward getting you to the first gig and the last. My philosophy of cheap powerful tools has not changed; only the gig. I make 3D worlds.

Courtesy of Tony Parisi and Keith Victor and Media Machines, there is a cheap 3D editor that can do what that VW microbus could do: get you to the gig on time and under budget. In fact, unlike that bus which cost me $250 in 1973 dollars, this 3D is editor is FREE!

Yes, go to Media Machines and download your own copy compliments of the VRML/X3D community that has its roots in the early days of the web that had its roots in the early days of Free Beer world that had its roots in the Summer of Love. Make of that what you will, you can't haggle with a free lunch, and yes, they do exist. So let's take this buggy out to a gig.

Today, we are making pots. No, not the Gaz-Giz kind, but the kind you put in your new virtual apartment. You have one of those, yes? Everyone who is anyone does. Geez…

To do this, we use a feature sometimes called by graphics geeks, the Surface of Revolution. It sounds cool and it is. I don't understand a lot of graphicsGeekSpeak and you probably don't either, so say, Amen and move on. Think of the Surface of Revolution as a potter's wheel or a lathe. When the object is turned, it takes the shape where ever you are pressing on the clay or the cutting blade touches the wood or metal. In Virtual Reality, all of this is virtual. Makes sense, yes? You place points to create a line that describes the outline of one side of the pot, press the Show Me button, and the computer makes the shape. It doesn't get easier than that. Or cheaper.

If you have downloaded and installed the Flux Studio 2.0 editor, open it. On the left are the windows that display what you build. Think of these as your scribing surface, drawing panel, back-of-an-IHOP-napkin. These are where objects are displayed. Parallel and on the upper right is a Treeview control that enables you to select objects by their name and position them in the scene relative to other objects. Below that is the dialog that displays the properties of these objects. Of you select an object in the Treeview, the dialog below will show you its adjustable properties. These are displayed as tabs.

At the top are drop down menus. There are icons beneath and around the borders for different construction techniques. Click on the Create menu.



In the figure above, you see the drop down Create menu. Click the Create Revolution menu item. Take a moment to enjoy that thought.

A pair of small windows pop up on the screen. The one on the left is a drawing pane. Here is where you place, move, add and delete the points of the line that is a silhouette of the shape of your revolution. If you have a copy of the Jefferson Airplane "Volunteers", now is a good time to put it on. On the left of the screen in the Treeview, notice the small vase-like icon with the label "Revolution: Revolution1". The label is duplicated in the dialog "General Node Parameters" below.



The window to the left of the drawing pane is the control window for creating revolutions. As labeled below, you see that each button changes what the cursor does when you click in the drawing pane.



Surface of Revolution Control Panel

Insert point: adds a point

Add to end: the main control that adds points to either end of the line.

Move point: click on a point and pull it to the position desired.

Delete point: enuff said

Close points: this creates a closed shape.

Show grid: turns the grid on and off.

Snap to grid: forces entered points to be on a grid line.

Update: actually the "Update Solid and Close Window" command. Geeky. This is the command to create the revolution and close the two windows. It looks like an OK hand gesture. A V for Victory might have been more Revolutionary but Ok is Ok.

Want a revolution? Got the revolution!



Play with these. Enter some points, make some lines, pull them, delete them, have fun. Notice that the shape can be made smoother or jagged by adding and deleting points. If you push them out, you get ridges. If you push them in, you get a groovier pot. Enjoy the moment.



Hint: the line should close on the diagonals on the left if you want the shape to be symmetrical and close at the top or bottom. If you want the top or bottom to be open, don't push the points to the line. After you make one or two, you'll get the idea. This is very easy stuff but the results are spectacular.

There is your line. It looks like the alien that came to Serve Man in the Twilight Zone.

Select the Update/Ok/ShowMeShapesOfThingsToCome icon. Whew! You've made a short squat top. Ok, that is a backwards pot. What can you expect from a dyslexic?



Notice the lines around the shape. These are the vertices that make up the shape. Vertices create faces. Each area in the lines is an individual face. Look at the dialog on the left. You can change the number of faces that make up the shape by adding or subtracting from the # of Sides property on the Shape tab (the icon that looks like a pot). A higher number creates more faces and a smoother shape. A smooth surface looks good, but the more faces you add, the slower the animation. In any world with a single object, you can make a perfect rendering but as the world gets more objects, the world slows down noticeably. Be prudent when building these one at a time with an eye toward putting them into a more complex world later.

At the bottom is a button labeled, "Edit Cross Section". If you click on this, you will re-open the drawing and control windows. Try it. This lets you look at the shape, then go back and edit it some more. Computers are way better than potter's wheel and lathes in this respect. You don't have to throw mistakes away.

The window with the shape is divided into four different views: top, front, right and ISO. Where is left? Don't ask. The Man might be listening. If you have a mouse with a thumbwheel, when a view is selected, you can use the wheel to bring the shape closer or further away. This is very handy for doing detail work on an object..



Click inside the Front View. Note that the lines go away and you can see your shape. Note also that the properties tab goes away. Not to worry. If you click on the vase with the label Revolution 1 in the TreeView, the properties dialog reappears.

If you don't like the size, you can change it by changing the scale. One way to do that is to select the scale command from a menu that you don't see. Right click in the Surface edit window and a floating dialog appears. It duplicates commands on the other menus and adds more. If you want to scale the top, select the Mirror/Scale/Rot (rotation) menu item.



Scaling is pretty obvious, but there is one beyond cool into marvelous feature there. Let's take a little side trip in our magic bus: notice the modest self-effacing Background Image menu item. Select it. This opens a dialog like the one you will use to paint the top as explained below.


When you select an image here, it is loaded into the Surface of Revolution drawing window so that you can use it to trace points on a complex image. Now that is just simply hot. I used an image my friends may remember from my past VRML work. It is the symbol of a certain very hot British songstress. Never will meet her; never will forget her. Kate rules.

Play with the other options as you have time. Remember you have a help file if you need to decrypt the geek speak.

At this point, you may want to look at the shape in 3D space instead of in the three views. At the top of the Flux window third row, second from the left is an icon that looks like a Windows window with a cube in it. Note I said, top, not the left side where there is also a Cube. That is for making cubes, not looking at them. Droplets optional.

Click on the Top cube. This will open the Flux Studio preview window.



There is your top in all its 3D glory. Pretty cool stuff. Notice the controls along the bottom. These enable you to move the shape around in the preview window as well as take screen snaps. This preview window is a window in the editor. Your editing commands are still on the dropdown at the top. Click on the button on the far left at the bottom with the X inside it. This will close the preview window and return you to the editor.

If you wanted a red top, you have one. On the other hand, virtual reality is psychedelic stuff and painted tops are way more psychedelic. In olden daze, we would whip out some dayglo paints so we could spin it over and over and over looking at colors whirling around and say, "Wow! Man!"

These days we can do much better than that. We can plaster pictures right on that surface with the click of a button. Click on the TreeView icon Revolution1 as before to open the properties window. Select the tab for the single texture as shown in the figure below.



Look at the properties dialog. There is a text entry box with a folder button to the right. This is for finding and loading a texture from a directory on your computer. Hint: it pays to collect textures from everywhere legal that you can get them and keep them. Cut up photos. Any spot on a photo that is reasonably flat facing you is a good candidate. Even if it is slightly skewed, you can use PhotoShop or even lowly Paint Brush skew commands to bring it back close to square. Making textures is a good hobby and it fills the time waiting for Battlestar Galactica to return.



Notice that the dialog also lets you use movie textures such as animated gifs or even, those movies you are hiding from your kids. If you want a spinning top with Auntie Grizelda picking you up as a baby or an animation of geeks playing leap frog, have at. This is your world. No one can tell you what to do here. Way better than dayglo.

Click on the folder icon. This will open a File Dialog for finding and opening images. Note that it also optionally will display thumbnails of the images in any directory you open. This is handy, but since thumbnails aren't always large enough to see what they really are, any image you select is automatically opened in a larger preview window. This is very very cool.

For my version of the top, I've selected a free stock photo of a wild rose. I'm an aging flower child. Sue me.



Hit the open button and the texture is automatically applied to the shape in the drawing pane. That's it. Not a single geeky graphics chore in the lot.

But you may want to adjust it. Images are sometimes too large, too small, or upside down, or sideways. Not to worry. If you look back at texture properties window, you will see Drag options. Having Drag options is one of the most spiritual choices aging flower children and some nightclubs could ever dream of.

Select the Drag To Scale if it is not selected, then put your cursor on the shape in the drawing pane. Move it up and down or left and right. Notice the image on the shape gets bigger and smaller, or multiplies. This allows you to set the texture sizes and positions to your tastes. You can also enter values into the text boxes.

When you have more time, play around with the Multi-texture features. This lets you use multiple textures on the same shape not as additional pictures, but as a composite that changes the appearance by making it more luminous…. Eyurp… shinier, or gives it bumps like fabric by combining the textures in special geeky ways. You can waste many weekends playing with this feature.

The next to last step is to look at your master work in a real 3D viewer. Flux Studio comes bundled with Flux, an X3D/VRML viewer. When you select the button at the top left of the Flux Studio window, the one that has X3D in stoned looking letters (who makes this stuff up?), the shape automatically opens up in the Flux viewers. Play with the controls to fly around it, rotate/examine it. Welcome to Virtual Reality!



You want to save the top. Select the File command at the top far left. You can save your file as:

A Flux file. The editor internal format that enables it to be reloaded without importing it.

An X3D file. This is the new version of VRML97. It has two syntax options: the classic curly syntax or XML. X3D has more features than VRML97 and improved modeling fidelity. Spend some time on the web lists learning about these.
VRML97: the original Virtual Reality Modeling Language (version 2) still in wide use today.

Compressed or uncompressed: the file can be saved as a gzip file for better life as a good netizen (say smaller and faster). Or if you like to hack inside the language itself, save it out as uncompressed and you can open it in PFE (Professional File Editor) for VRML or any of the amazing XML editors. Making objects in Flux Studio then studying the uncompressed file is a good way to learn the language.




This is a vase I made with Flux Studio for a temple in the River of Life VRML/X3D Virtual Reality world. My wife wants one these for her real world knick knack shelves. This proves the online world and the real world are not only blurring, they are feeding on the same karma which is ultimately, the same thing. Very zen.



The image on the vase is from a real Hindu temple wall panel.

In the old days, I would have stashed combustible comestibles in this. Today, I'd keep it for my cremation remains.

Ashes to ashes... bus to dust.

Namaste!

Why Numbers Matter

There was a recent request for numbers of web3D developers by which the seeker was trying to differentiate Second Life and WoW from the VRML/X3D developers and users. The reply made was that SL and WoW are monolithic applications, not standard 3D languages. Comparing these numbers can misinform. If the numbers misinform, then perhaps we shouldn't look for the numbers.

Perhaps we should look at why the numbers happen.

<personalRantFollows />

What is in the content? Why does some number of users go to SL? Why does some number of developers keep developing in VRML97 or X3D? Is SL really an entertainment site or is it the new page metaphor, a world metaphor that wraps activities that people want to do communally? What are the activities that draw them there? Is it entertainment or sales? Or is it what works in most media: entertainment financed by sales? Google is a search company being financed by ads. They used that to expand the activities they support such as user-generated content that enables them to provide targeted ads. Isn't SL a VR world that provides activities to focus sales? Is that what the Toyota Scion site is (shop and race)? Doesn't this combine sales and games just as Google combines search and ads?

The numbers don't interest me as much as the activities. I build content but I don't think the content I build is relevant to those business models any more than network news is relevant to selling hybrids unless they pair news pieces on hybrids with advertisements for Prius's and they do. So how is my content relevant to a revenue generating activity? Do I care? Should I? Well, sure, but maybe the art I make is more relevant to showing other artists (in my case, musicians) how they can return to a profit basis for writing songs? Where do I sell that?

I suppose the real basis for wanting numbers is to show that there is traffic, eyeballs as some used to say, to prove one generates profit-seeking activities. Businesses need those profits or they have to cut quality or services.

There is no free lunch and damm little justice, but karma and duty to the investors are very reliable. So when you look at numbers and what generates numbers, remember you have to keep making more than you made last year to keep investors happy, so you will have to enter into some kind of bargain for access to those eyeballs just as CNet has to put an article up a day on SL and SL has to pay marketing to see to it they do. Restructuring and leveraged buy outs are crueler than the hook in the shiny lure to the fishbrains who swim toward them without hesitation.

Numbers aren't the only reason for doing this. We did Irishspace a) because we could b) because it was fun c) because we were asked and d) because we could make something good happen for a small village trying to make something good happen for their children. None of that is wrong. All of it is valued for some n of value. Did it generate numbers? It did in Tralee and almost a decade later, I had the pleasure with my wife and kids of seeing the real world Jeanie Johnston sail into Savannah harbor and I had a round with the crew. Did it generate big numbers for some n of big. Nope. Should it have? I don't care. Never did.

I'm not particularly interested in YouTube because videos of fat geeks dancing around their computers bore me. A world of poetry and music and beautiful 3D art with a sultry sad devadasi won't interest a lot of people who are perfectly happy with YouTube and FARK. I don't care. I can't care. The generation gap is as real as age discrimination and there isn't much one can do to change that. My tastes are for slower, classier, deeper emotionally evocative content. I'll take the worst Beethoven string quartet over the best song ever sung on American Idol. It's an age thing.

I do it for the joy of doing it and doing it well. I wish that was a profit-seeking activity but it isn't. It isn't entertainment precisely. It is pleasure seeking, not profit seeking, where the person I'm pleasing is me. So perhaps it is entertainment. It just isn't paced to the nerd subculture of fast, short, thin, pale and lacking in fidelity even if long on earnest spiritual values if not practice.

If that makes me selfish, unconcerned about the numbers, unconcerned about the web, I can only say that I've kept my promise made in Monterey a decade ago to fight for the community, to stick with it. That I've done through the lean times. Heck, I've received email that claims I am personally responsible for the demise of VRML. Maybe I am but I don't think so. It takes a hero to make tragic mistakes of those proportions and I am no hero, just a musician who hacks VRML.

Do we need heros? If this is a time of big numbers, it is not a time of heros. It is a time of men with spreadsheets and revenue estimates, a time Pesce said would come. And I'm glad for that. That means I can work on content, enjoy it, and look for work. Managers you will have a plenty, and they will have you too.

Numbers are not the cause of art. They are sometimes a side effect of it, but I'm not clever enough to predict when that will happen. If 2ndLifers want to look at what I do any time soon, they'll have to download an X3D/VRML app. The only good news for me there is that if they want to do that in ten years, it will probably still work on at least one viewer. If SL can make that claim in 2017 given the pressures to make profits and sustain growing numbers, my hat is off to them. By that time, good Lord willing and the oceans don't rise, I'll use Flux to convert it again.

The key to content is that if it is good enough, it keeps being converted and rehosted... year after year, platform after platform. Ask the folks who own the American song bag about that.

Numbers matter. Content cycles. That's why standards trump platforms.

I want a longer cycle even if at a lower profit. If I don't get that, at least I had more fun trying. Rick Nelson had it right:

You can't please everyone, so you got to please yourself.

NEW! Flux Studio 2.0

I use different X3D/VRML editors. Some of them like V-Realm Builder are deadware from the the 1990s but given the stability of the language, still an excellent tool as long as one is building VRML97. Others such as Professional File Editor never go away because a basic ASCII editor has to be in the toolbox of anyone creating works with the web open formats in pointy and curly syntaxes, but again, mostly curly. Some such as Numedia Avatar Studio do one complex task so well and so simply that the tool keeps being downloaded, copied to new servers, distributed and used lonnnggg after the team that produced it is disbanded.

Then something really powerful and affordable (say FREEE!!!) comes out and quickly jumps to the top of the stack. It takes in all of the functions of these editors, complements them, adds even newer and better features, accommodates multiple syntaxes and application languages, and does it all so elegantly that it becomes the workhorse.

Such an editor is Media Machines Flux Studio 2.0.

Provided free for personal use (is there any other kind in 3D?), this is astounding. Flux Studio is the next generation incarnation of a favorite among the furry vermelers, Spazz 3D by Keith Victor. Keith teamed up with one of the VRML inventors, Tony Parisi and his Media Machines company to produce Flux Studio. That's enough history.

3D editors are notoriously expensive beasties when doing high end work. Though there are good free ones such as Blender, most are complex and tend to be useful only by those with a deep understanding and skill set in the mathematics and buzzwords of 3D technology. While Flux has no lack of this, it wraps it in visualization techniques and GUI that make a straightforward work process possible. Features such as multi-texture editing can consume a week of experimentation.

Applying textures and scaling them are simple tasks. Boolean carving is provided. There is a Javascript editor and a Smart Object editor. 3D preview mode (rendering in a 3D browser) is a pushbutton away.

Whereas early VRML editors were strictly VRML editors, Flux Studio imports and exports VRML classic and X3D encodings flawlessly. When converting VRML97 up to X3D, the look of the output is worth the download. Flux Studio scrubs the code and formats it for ease of reading in the ASCII editor. But wait! There is more! Flux Studio can also import and export Google KML files for those doing Google Earth work. The beloved Avatar Studio avatars can be imported and animated using the character animation features.

Extruded text is tough to do without editor support and is an expensive object in the vertex economy but great for startup screens. Flux Studio not only provides it, it provides canned animations. Speaking of this, there are canned animations for cameras as well. Export the code, look at the scripts, and modify to your own needs. There is 2D layer support for HUDs. Very cool!

The complementing product is the Flux Viewer. Also free, this supports streaming media which for the musicians among us, is vital. MP3s are a must have when building kick-ass 3D for the web although I confess I prefer wav files for CD products. Now I can have the best of both.

Soon Flux will have a network node that provides what 3D on the Web builders have needed since the early days: a simple routing mechanism for communications with the web from inside the world without the laborious work involved with setting up Java applets and deep knowledge of network protocol code. This is one feature I am eagerly waiting to see. It is to be demoed at the Perugia conference this spring. Very very cool!

Parisi and Victor continue to provide the Web 3D community a level of dedicated support that is hard to find these days but was so common in the early days of the web. One has to admire that dedication to the values of the pioneers of the web and the continued improvement of the Media Machines product while providing it to the web content community, an underpaid bunch of zealous junkyard dogs by reputation and fact, for a price they can afford: $0. Unreal! The furries say THANK YOU!

Full disclosure: I have zero financial affiliation with Media Machines. I have 100% affiliation with their community values and continued innovation in the open web 3D market.

Vista Premiere: Good in the Barn, not On the Dance Floor

I attended a locally-hosted Vista premiere last night. Some observations:

Microsoft should reconsider the policy of having locals present Vista in cities bursting with technologists as the area I live in is. There are too many unanswered questions, not a good pace to the presentation, and the audience comments tend to take over

I won’t buy this soon. The graphics eat any machine more than three years old. If like me, you have one of those Dell’s that can only accept 512k RAM max, you are as we say, SOL.

The voice recognition is impressive. The trouble is what will you do with that? It’s a cool demo when you can speak to Notepad and it gets a very high percentage of that right, but for anything very long, unless you are sight-impaired or arthritic, text composition by typing is a hand-to-eye learned activity and fingers don’t wear out as fast as a voice does. Still it is very impressive.

Did I say the graphics eat the machine? While Aero’s see through panes and 3D-like displays are great eye-candy, I didn’t see anything very productive about them. Is it worth buying another machine to do jobs I can already do with the machine I have? No.

The biggest feature that is appreciably touted in a one hour demo is the improved security. Unfortunately, that is like a demo of the brakes in your car. Until you are in trouble at high speed, it is a nice-to-have when you finally need it, but not a feature that is demo-enhancing. There are better features for setting up a machine but these are not used that often outside of a computer installation shop, so the ratings system that impressed the demo technician doesn’t get more than a yawn out of me. I suspect that there are a lot of new Vista features that are like that. They are real improvements but only in that they fix the glaring bugs of the previous system, or are mostly useful when the system is first set up or to the technicians who do that often. In other words, it is solid, but not sexy.

The almost subtle but possibly most revelatory feature is that the web browser is just another window as it should have always been. In other words, Vista clearly shows that web ubiquity is here but like the ubiquity of paved roads and traffic lights, not to be noticed unless absent.

Overall, I don’t think I’ll be interested in Vista until the applications written for it are so compelling that it is a must have. Microsoft’s mystifying failure to recognize and provide for the hot 3D market is an indicator that once again, their futurists and evangelists are behind the curve the same way Nashville is behind New York and Los Angeles when it comes to music. The Music Row mindset is very good at getting out product that the middle of the demographics wanted yesterday, but not so good at changing mindsets for a new and different paradigm of user-computer interaction, much less the follow-on social interactions that come of systems who’s main application is human-to-human communication.

So far, Vista looks good in the barn, but not on the dance floor.

Emergence Juju

Real time 3D engines are the kinds of toys Georg Cantor wished he had.

I was taught that a computer was like a sewing machine; set the pattern and it will repeat that pattern without fail endlessly. Math buffs know different and why. Programmers live with the digital uncertainty and keep their fingers crossed that nobody is ever silly enough to let the machines run the planet or vote.

Every now and then, the VRML/X3D engine I use (BitManagement) will surprise me. One example is when the headlight turns itself on or other bits of randomness like binding to a new viewpoint without warning (typically when in motion), or routed events that don't fire even when the code is apparently correct, usually lights or sound events.

One tonight was grand. The opening title world has a golden fog node in it to give the sequence a bit of hazy slow depth (a hazy shade of summer?). Anywho, when the replaceWorld script fired, it replaced all of the nodes as it is commanded to do, then randomly turned the golden fog back on a few seconds after the new world loaded. It hung around quite neatly until the purple fog timer fired and replaced it (a scheduled purple haze all around her brain). That's a stack error but it looked mondo neat until it disappeared.

Part of the fun of real-time 3D is pseudo-randomness. Some behaviors emerge because different timers conspire to create different appearances in scheduled sequences such as the boat ride or when the camera follows Kamala. Others creep out when the software bugs conspire to play tricks on the author. Both would be in the bag if I could get the engine to do them twice, but are so much cooler because they won't.

Ya gotta love this stuff when the world starts hitting a level of complexity that it really does become emergent as chaos drives the evolution of a scene. I wrote it and I've been through it thousands of times and it still surprises me. Good juju.

... or bugs. Hard to tell the difference sometimes. Maybe that is why evolution horrifies creationists. They keep thinking someone or something is in control when in fact, it just wrote the scene and is now watching for the fascination of not knowing. They believe they are rooting for God when in fact, it was Lucifer that was horrified by the messiness and unknowingly, they've joined the wrong team.

If nothing is beyond the infinite, maybe Friedrich August von Hayek's 'necessary ignorance' is that nothing that has to be in the plan to satisfy the creative urge.

Is VRML Dead? Part II (No, It just smells funny)

Our colleague in France, Eric Maranne, wrote back to me:

Do you mind if, for me, I'd like to consider X3D as *a* VRML ? I may be old school but I don't care using VRML or X3D. I use both ...
It's just that X3D is a VR Modelling Language for me, and that's what for I'm using it. VRML isn't dead... some people keep on calling it X3D, I'm not, that's all. I for myself am authoring VR, not X stuff (my mother wouldn't like it), nor simply 3D (I'm so bad at 3D I couldn't sell it). Please read X3D when I write VRML, unless I speak of VRML of course. Useless thread. Eric.

Eric is a prodigious author of VRML applications, ahem VR applications for public safety and homeland security. Being familiar with his work, I can say with sincerity, he is very serious. Still I have to reply contentiously being a contender and not one to let sleeping dogs lie or even sleep around much.

I don't mind at all, Eric.

As I said, I'm still authoring a VRML97 application. At some point, I'll transform it up to being an X3D world. Why do I use this dead language? It still works and I have the tools and the training. Convenience trumps standards and latest and greatest until someone pays for the transition. And you know something, when a technology is convenient, IT NEVER DIES. As one pundit pointed out, Fortran and Cobol are still alive. That is supposed to be a criticism until you find out how much Cobol is running your bank accounts today and into the foreseeable future and how much Fortran is running missile control systems worldwide.

The fun of all of those quotes in part one is a) they tend to lead eventually back to one or two groups of people and b) they don't ever make a case for why it is technically dead. They just keep beating the horse, the Famous Mr. Dead. And we all know that Mr. Dead Will Never Speak.

Let's say they are right. In fact, yes, VRML97 (not VR: everyone likes that term in the marketing department despite the fact that very few definitions for it hold up under case-based examination), is dead. X3D has replaced it and VR and a host of other applications are being built with X3D now. Let's not debate that because we both know we are debating a syntax, a handful of nodes, and some improvements in the object model.

The not fun is they created an impression across the web that the ISO-standard technology isn't worth working with. Note Peddie's comments. He never says why we are furry or why he might get all of those emails. He just dismisses the whole idea. Clay Shirky tried that too but Clay got so much nastry feedback, being the trendster he is, he has stepped back to reevaluate and now decided that 3D is useful but the winner is games. Raph Koster, a former creative director at Sony, (Sony was once a very serious player in the VRML market) says 'no one serious' works with VRML but misses completely the serious applications in public safety, in homeland security, in cultural training, in scenario based simulations for terrorist defense, for medical applications, in fact, in so many applications we have to look for where it isn't being applied.

Well, that's easy: big dollar games online or offline. Hmmm ... a theme.

Now one comment made was quite cogent: we are of the first generation of the web. Some of us are actually cavemen who taught the first generation to walk upright, but I digress and don't want to upset my knuckle draggin' cousin in the Geico commercial. The point is fair though: the upcoming generation simply doesn't care. As with most new generations, they tend to dis whatever their parents did when they were teens, get lost in their twenties in a bar somewhere, and in the their thirties, get married and bring back their parents' music as 'classics'.

I suspect that is where VRML97 ends up but the point is, they will believe what they read and adopt what they experience among their own peers. They have been learning game building from Unreal and Quake engines. They can't imagine why one can't build online games with high performance and they won't accept excuses because they've seen it done. They may or may not know too much about the optimizations of those engines or those designs or care that highly optimized engines aren't generically applicable.

Now we look around at the gaming market itself. I'm no expert but if what I read is right, it's a very expensive undertaking for competitive products. So anyone trying to do something new or investment worthy in that space starts looking at adjacent markets if they don't have the budgets for the game to accompany the movie "Anna Nicole: Her Second Life" particularly since there is no mystery about her death: her first life killed her.

Lo and behold, thanks to SL, there are the social networking applications that with their vast expertise, can be turned into games. And because this is the web and we all know the web is about interoperability and interchangeability, in short, it is a standards game, they are learning the game of standards.

Sounds good, really but is the gaming community, historically a community of one-off testosterone charged couldn't get laid in high school geeks the right community to create "real standards for 3D On The Web"? I dunno.

Could be. If the cavemen couldn't make a go of it, maybe the Cro-Magnons can.

But the serious question for serious thinkers is are games the right place to create a core set of standards for all of the diverse applications for 3D On The Web. I think games are a sub-genre of real-time 3D and that the goals of game designers are very different from the goals of medical applications. The goals of say 'cultural immersion' applications have a bit more in common with games but maybe not as much as the 'immersive album' can.

The criteria one might look at is does the user get emotionally involved when using the application? I'm not going to spend time here investigating as the VR academics do, why people become emotionally involved. We did those rants about VR in the 90s. The fact is, people are emotionally attached to everything from their remote controls to their garage openers to the outcome of American Idol judging, so maybe that is too common an experience to be worthy of a PhD thesis. One might get emotionally involved with a real-time 3D rendering of a cave mining system (I'm sure the cavemen do) or a plot of the brain centers activated in autistic children, but likely the emotionally involved will be the audience: parents, and not the users, not the doctors. For these applications of real-time 3D or VR, I don't think emotional involvement is the point of the presentation as it is with a game.

The fact of something being VR or a game or any real-time 3D genre is the styles, constraint and goals for the users of the *content type*, not necessarily the technology. People will not know or care about the technology underneath; they will know one when they see one or play one. That's all the buying public actually cares about.

So now, what should be the features of core standards for 3D on the Web? The new generation hasn't revealed that yet. And I think it is a safe bet that they won't until their products are fielded. Then while they try to keep their heads above the shakeout, they may open source their products, and of course, open source is what standards are all about. Of Course Of Course, just ask the horse.

I'll bet that after a shakeout, these people who have so actively diss'ed VRML and now X3D, these so 'serious that we have to invent our own standards' will replicate what is already in the ISO standard, but take a lot longer to achieve its buy in ACROSS the applications or in currently investing organizations because they don't have the experience across the applications or in cooperating to build a standard across companies, across communities. In short, I doubt they have the process skills, the legal expertise or the sheer selfless tenacity to see to it that the outcome creates the greatest good for the greatest number.

Yes they'll have products. No doubt. But standards? I think we'll see a lot of motion but no results. It's a familiar story in all businesses these days, but on the web, it is already as the musicians say, a standard.

Yes, we really should listen to what they have to say and if it is different note that, and if it is better *embrace and extend* it. And if it is neither, put that fact with URLs for supporting facts on billboards from San Francisco to San Juan, at least, in virtual reality representations of those places.

Why? Because that is how the west was won: advertising ... and a dead horse.

Is VRML Dead? Part I

We're having a contentious debate on the X3D and VRML lists. As usual and not surprisingly to my friends, I'm contending. Loudly as always. This blog has two parts.

Is VRML Dead? Well... yeah.

VRML IS DEAD

Despite the fact that you and I still use it to build, in point of fact of continued features evolution or market uptake, or standardization, it is "really quite sincerely dead" to quote the coroner.

It has been replaced by X3D, the next generation. It lives on in the largesse of the browser vendors who continue to support its nodes in their products but who aren't adding any features that make it into the official ISO standard because, well, that version of the standard is now obsolete. It is generally considered bad to work on obsolete technology unless you happen to be NASA who can't afford to replace a Shuttle every year because the production lines shut down two decades ago, or the guys who paint the Eiffel Tower and fix rusted bolts and the like (where do they get those bolts now?)

Is X3D just dressed up VRML? Someone else can work that rant. But it is certainly the case that it isn't VRML. Casual inspection will reveal that. One can make the case that X3D isn't an improvement. I think that would be on very thin ice.

Worse, VRML is obnoxiously dead, deliberately dead, and celebrated dead. Just plain old quit breathing dead, autopsied and signed out to the coroner dead. How do we know? Well, the wisdom of the crowds thing again. We keep reading about the demise on the web. Time to accept it, yes?

Here are some expert quotes. The first is from a comment on Ajax3D.

Here's what a rather useful white paper on the subject by Tony Parisi, one of the pioneers of the by-now antediluvian VRML standard has to say: ..."

http://www.opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/search/label/vrml

Wow Dude. If I had to do it without a dictionary, I'm not sure I could spell 'antediluvian'. Is that the same as "not merely dead"?

We are celebrating the 10th anniversary of VRML... but, is VRML dead?
We refer to the people who practice the art of VRML as furry vermals. VRML was developed to make moving CAD files easier. Some people with great visions, (perhaps too much) imagination, and seemingly unlimited energies pushed VRML into the realm of virtual reality and from there into web 3D. It never satisfied any of those visions and a lot of hearts and wallets were broken. VRML still isn't dead, but then neither is Fortran. Things don't seem to die in this industry. But neither Fortran or VRML are mainstream or considered as a viable vehicle for anything any more. And I know this will bring out of the wood work and from under the rocks all those VRML lovers who still toil away at proving what magnificent thing VRML is, or will be with the next release that is.

http://www.3d-test.com/interviews/jonpeddie_1.htm

Got that last bit right, Jon.

Raph Koster's comment about the yawning reception in the VRML community to the Metaverse Summit (you can hear the trumpets and the choirs of angels for that one) are fatal. You should read the attached comments as well. Note that Raph is a 'serious' thinker and was a chief designer of entertainment at Sony, a mover in the Ultima game and so on, so we have to take him very seriously:

http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/05/08/cnet-on-the-metavese-summit/

I'll be blunt: there are next to no important things being done in terms of online virtual worlds using VRML, and I don't know any significant players in the field who use VRML. The people with practical experience avoid it like the plague. Give up already on VRML!

Ok Raph, don't get excited. You'll get your turn at the podium again.

This one is good reading because it takes all groups to task for not noticing what the cultures have to offer to each other:

http://mmocodex.com/blog/?p=6633

Note the quote though:

... for young people, or newly-enabled and tekkified old people, especially women and non-Americans who have taken to SL by leaps and bounds, these old fuddy-duddy concerns like 'skepticism triggered by the historical failure of things like LambdaMOO or VRML' don't compute. What the hell is LambadaMOO? I never heard of it until I branched out from SL into geek-world; I'm certain I wouldn't recognize VRML if it bit me in the ass; but I have a full and engaging Second Life.

So yeah, there is quite a bit of us vs them out there. You have to decide if you care. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I was bitten in the ass by a furry vermal once. It hurt. A lot.

This one takes the whole 3D market to task and uses VRML as the whipping horse because apparently this fellow didn't get his VRML cookie when they were plentiful on the freebies table of Web 1.0:

http://www.fudco.com/habitat/archives/000047.html

Note the repeating theme here and in the comments: 3D Good; VRML Failure; let's not do VRML again. We won't. As the coroner I must confer that I've thoroughly examined her.

If maps from these next guys load as badly as their Flashy web page, I gotta wonder about their chops in geospatial:

Along similar lines, what happened to VRML? Remember when Microsoft even had their own VRML browser, World View, and included it with Internet Explorer (3.0, I think)? Many of these 3D visualization tools seem to hold so much promise for the geospatial community. A new one blossoms every few years and then just wilts on the vine. Is it some technical barrier that they run up against, or just lack of interest?"

I lost the URL for that one. Probably a merciful forgetting given the load time.

I actually like this article from Prokovsky:

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2006/12/clay_shirky_or_.ht
ml

The comments are great too.

Then from someone who likes pasta and who's rants on this topic are better than mine and quite a bit more opaque:

http://tecfa.unige.ch/perso/staf/nova/blog/2006/04/29/place-panel-at-the-net
publics/

9. VRML blew it. Will there be a successor spatiality to HTML? Of course there are stuff like that, especially in the GIS world + also in the open cartography community there are already few instances: annotating space with metadata; about building semantic models of places; about exchanging geospatial data in RDF, what Jo Walsh does a simple vocabulary for describing physical spaces and the connections between them there is also PML: Psychogeographical Markup Language:

PML is a unified system to capture meaningful psychogeographical [meta]data about spaces which can be used to compose psychogeograms: diagrammatic representations of psychogeographically experienced space.

Scary stuff that psychogeographic markup. It must be awesome for Halloween candy trail planning.

From Slashdot:

Ten years ago i was working in the virtual reality field. People swore we would have a 3D web in ten years ten years ago. Anyone remember VRML?"

No one serious but we forgot about ADA too. Oh wait; the government still pays very high rates for ADA programmers. Nevermind. The Shaggy Dog Story of all programming languages is still healthy and living at Fort Meade.

From one of the Electric Sheep blogs, a fun mention of two of our VRML regulars with a funny anecdote:

http://blogs.electricsheepcompany.com/jerry/?m=200607&paged=2

I'm excited about one of our new presenters in the line-up (we'll have a number of short talks spark conversation). You can't talk about the metaverse space without looking back over VRML, an early attempt to create a 3D standard on the Web that famously tanked. Tony Parisi who helped create and evangelize VRML back in 1994 will be joining us to talk about what happened there and what he learned, as well as look forward to his new adventures with Media Machines.

Poor Tony. Being antediluvian must be a helluva comedown from being antidisestablishmententarian for so many years in Internet Time.

There are more quotes. You find most of them by typing "VRML Raph Koster" into the Google search box, so as I say, he is some kind of strange attractor for the funeral seating arrangments, but these put the eulogies in perspective.

For all the protests coming out of Europe on this topic, you Frenchies need to understand that you may not believe what is going on here, but this is what the Consortium reps have to face when they discuss 3D On The Web. That they are succeeding in spite of it testifies to their commitment to this technology and their sheer tenacity because this must be no fun at all.

After all, no one wants to be the coroner. On to part II...

Standards Whack A Mole

The Standards Game as Instrument of Competition and Regulation is the whack-a-mole of the web culture. Rick Jeliffe takes issue with it and Rick has plenty of experience with all sides of this game.

The status of the document as a legal or regulatory instrument and the status or provenance of the body which creates it can be usefully separated. A document can be regulatory given the context of its citation. For example, a standard cited in a contract has a legal basis for regulating the conduct of actions performed under the contract.

Provenance (typically, the history of the ownership of a document) is a murky term in this context but I don't have a better one to describe the committee that controls the creation and history of the document handling (its history). I am equally horrified by self-selection as the sole means of determining who can contribute to a document that may be citable in a regulatory context. Standards editors need reasonable credentials.

Volunteerism is a good force but not always an adequate credential.

Now are the economists are telling us to ignore the technical and understand the economic?

Ok. Weirder and weirder.

1. A VC wants a four for one punch on their ‘contribution’. That means barriers to competition (patents or press) or a pyramid scheme (faux economy and press). Is that economic or technical?

2. A standard works best if there are multiple implementations prior to standardization. IBM says we need to accept SecondLife as a standard for 3D on The Web because it needs standards. Raph Koster announces a new company with himself as the President developing a new product to be a standard for 3D on the Web RSN. There is an existing ISO standard for 3D On The Web with 17 existing implementations and diverse applications. The aforementioned have one: social networks, but the first one has subscribers and the second one has 'an expert who has done interesting work'. Who should be the standard editor? Is this technical or economic?

This is classic "money rules" rules. The deal is to make as big a splash initially as possible, call it a standard, flip it up, take the cash and leave the shell behind. If we accept that for product standards, we are creating carnage. It is well and good to compete on product features that improve the fundamentals of some technology. Races are won at Grand Prix by figuring out a better implementation for weight to power and fuel consumption (fire air fuel). If it works, it makes it into a generation of muscle cars AND hybrids for eco-sensitive implementations. That's standard. That might improve sales for some manufacturer. That's economic.

But legislation to pick a technology by fiat without substantial credible improvements in the performance of the technology, that's piracy by government fiat. Economists become the pirate in the crow's nest surveying the horizon for the next victim.

Sun execs need to take a hard look at their business model and their own executive suite. Standards games didn't give them a profitable quarter for the first time in years. Improvements in hardware performance did. If they don't get that, they need to replace Schwartz and anyone he hired. IBM will do as it has been: make money on services and if a technology comes along to improve the performance of those services, they switch. Investments in standards are chump change in that model.

Microsoft will continue to push its own technology to perform better and build bridges to any technology with a customer base large enough to justify the investment. That's economics.

Are All 3D Worlds Games?

Clay Shirky again, is not a fan of VR but having been challenged in his opinions, he keeps mulling the problem over, and not being a dumb guy, he zeros in on the issues. This one is better reasoned. It supports what some have been saying: games are a category of real-time 3D, a genre, and the genre has special qualifications that make this category different from VR. Equating all 3D with ‘games technology’ as some do isn’t a very good categorization and the analyses resulting are flawed.

I concur. On the other hand, I think his magic circle analogy while correct misses the obvious unstated fact: the engine of immersion is positive and negative feedback, all that ANY human interface requires to achieve immersion, and it is the same engine driving search technology. Games simply narrow the rules and acceptance of the rules like the suspension of disbelief in dramatic presentation is the crucial buy in. Shirky is actually trying to diminish the status of real-time worlds such as Second Life, but he is stumbling around the right concepts at last, and that is progress.

3D, unlike the naive Wladavsky-Berger comparison with broadband, is not a push technology: it is a pull technology where the database is the human brain. Shirky is almost there in what he is saying but missing the critical distinction that any interface can be made to pull. 3D is quite a bit better than some alternatives and this isn’t limited to sexual expression. He is being male and somewhat childish there. A good looking avatar works for many applications and as fascinating as that is, it can be combined as sex has always been combined in marketing advertising with other stimuli for different tasks.

Still, he is making a good case that low-feedback VR worlds don’t compete well even where MU. Determining ahead of the design what the rules are and what the buy in has to be by the user to accept those rules is crucial to good design.

The SIMS inventor has some good points about GUI design in these worlds that ought to be reviewed by everyone, particularly, that the first tasks on entering a world should teach the rules for navigating it. I am surprised but humbled by the fact that most people I demo for don’t know to press the left mouse button, hold it down, then push it in a direction. Then when shown that, they are very bad at it for the first five minutes. Then they get proficient and if I try to correct anything they do, they resist me and keep whacking away. That is a good thing. They are getting hooked by the struggle and the need to prove themselves. Only after I show them how to follow Kamala and that she leads them to cool presentations do they start to notice the music and actually get hooked into the content the world is wrapping. Then they ask me if they can ‘fly’ and I show them the right-click menu. Then they ask me about having an avatar of their own, and I show them the choice on the right click menu. Then I sit back and watch.

Will they come back? Maybe, maybe not, but I built the world to sell the music, not the other way around. Once they buy it; I'm done. :-)

So there is an aspect of game in every world we build but how we emphasize it and how we get past it, those are the delicacies of our craft.

Trading in Virtual Goods

Business Week writes that we are on the cusp of another web shakeout as the frictionless business mavens discover the difference between a 'science experiment' and a going business. The cost of the prototype is less but the constants required for scaling remain the same, employees, machines, insurance, marketing, customer service, and so on.

The only economy that seems to evade inspection is the black market in virtual goods being reported at CNet. eBay banned sales of virtual goods but gave Linden Labs a pass because it is supposed to have a virtual economy that translates to the real economy. There are two problems with that:

1. As reported in the last blog, ValleyWag analysts show that the LL virtual economy is a Ponsi game.
2. Second Life is a closed system. Owning or selling something there doesn't mean you can actually take it anywhere else.

I could understand a market for virtual goods where you can actually move the goods into a different world. Like the market for used car parts, you can actually put that on a different car if it is standards-compatible. As no such thing exists for Second Life or World of Warcraft, one wonders if this is yet another frictionless economy love child that assumes something has a value just because it can be displayed to more than one person.

One gets the feeling that there is some kind of weird shakeout and wakeup call coming in this market. The pundits who have been promoting it will be there to tell they saw it coming all along. And so it goes.

Life IS A Do-Over At Least Virtually

Just as the most brilliant economic minds gather at the World Economic Forum and ooh and aah over the alledged invention of the most important technology to come along in years

Second Life

an independent researcher confirms what the real pioneers in the field have been saying for some time now. Yes, friends, Linden Dollars are a Ponsi scheme (aka, pyramid).

The problem for the rest of the real-time 3D genre vendors will be to be at sea when the wave crashes and not moored to the dock waiting. That means building markets not reliant on SL-allied community efforts. It is actually not difficult to do but don't be perceived as an SL cognoscenti when it happens. Pick another genre or prove why your implementation is NOT like SL at least where the content economy is concerned.

Between the tempest over Microsoft paying a very real expert, Rick Jeliffe, to edit the technical contents of a Wikipedia article, and the self-selected experts for VR like Daniel Terdimann at News.com (Fox News by another name) who have yet to build a world in a field they say they are experts about and point to their Wikipedia bio to justify that claim, one begins to ask if the web has simply devolved into a British tabloid where the facts are as suspect as their Prime Minister's sharable military intelligence and the taste is the same as their cooking.

Next time we go to war, let's take London and give it to the Aussies.

Slippery When Wet

The markets of virtual reality are filling up with virtual posers. It was to be expected. The rich and the want-to-be famous always find a technology just as it pops and then make claims on it. In this case, we have the Davos self-admirers speaking longingly and lovingly about their new discovery: Second Life, the most revolutionary technology to come along.

Except the technology has been there for years. The high rents haven't. That's a new wrinkle: virtual land for rent. I love it. Too bad the power grids don't but hey, since when has that bothered the rich and the posers?

For those aborigines who have been working and playing in virtual worlds for over a decade now, this sudden interest in the river is just fine. We can sell them water by the river for a long long time. Or until they find something more trendy. Otherwise, real-time 3D applications are here to stay. Who says? The posers at CNet, the posers at CNN, the posers at the local VC shop.

None of whom has built a single world. But that's ok, selling them water by the river is a good business.

Do you think we should warn them that it's slippery when wet?

Chung A Lung: Kaching! Kaching!

One of the strangely predictable bits of web evolution is how the online 3D worlds and their contractors and publicists have adopted the Hollywood tricks for generating publicity. The article linked in the title to the CNet article is an example of the Hollywood CatFight where two major stars embark on a public spat designed to bring in cameras and mentions in the tabloids. CNet has slowly devolved into a 'bloid and the SecondLife capital must be burning fast. I have to admit a sneaking respect for the Graef's for their clever exploitation of the griefers who decorated their CNet interview with flying penises. One wonders if some insiders didn't set this up for exactly this purpose, but what the heck; it's just virtual gamesmanship.

I stumbled into a site by a fellow named Rafe Koster. He seems to be one of the new breed of 3D pundits who have become the 'this lives; this dies' critics I guess who thrive as the counterbalance to Clay Shirky. The Terra Nova guys write funny stuff. It duplicates the same kinds of faux academia that we saw in the early days of VRML and Cybertown. They tell us that X3D is soooo over and that online communities avoid it like the plague. Rafe missed some major contracts that have been let out of Federal agencies specifying the use of the international 3D standards so his death spat may be a little premature, but again, that's ok. These are not the applications where one writes treatises on the social economy of the avatar or books on the history of virtual communities somewhat like histories of Spider Man and The Green Goblin.

Online communities are one way to use real-time 3D. Probably they aren't the most advanced but nonetheless, they are thriving. The pundits like Rafe keep rooting on the closed systems like Second Life and who can blame them. As with the Macintosh, the closed system handled complexity by locking the customer to its formats and its tools. Is that a metaverse? Could be. It's yet another iPod or Apple and it will sell well wherever ease is traded for the ability to reuse content. Remember, when Second Life tells the author that content is owned by the author, that is a true statement. It is owned by them the same way the public owns a statue in the park. They all have the right to visit it. They don't have the ability to take it home.

An Inconvenient Truth

It's my birthday today so I decided to watch a movie with my wife and kids. A mother and daughter, at the movie store stared at the latest horror flicks before picking out two. On the way out, they passed the section with
An Inconvenient Truth.

The daughter asked the mother

"What is this?"

The mother replied in a raspy cigarette stained voice with all the disdain of the defeated in denial,

It's that Al Gore thing.

The daughter said,

Isn't he that guy that Our President beat? Did he become a movie star?

Her mother laughed as her lungs struggled for a clear breath and said,

Nah he's still a Democrat. You know, more lies.

The daughter muttered under her breath in reply but her mother ignored it.

That was good enough for me. I took it home immediately.

See this movie. Invite some friends.

After the credits, when you see the Paramount disclaimer about the opinions in this movie not being the opinions of the Paramount Corporation following the legal stuff about not copying this DVD followed by the logo that proclaims this is a Paramount Classic, do two things: laugh at the irony of Paramount being worried that someone would confuse this movie with their opinions, then copy it anyway. Put a copy in your vault and give one to your smartest friend. Tell him or her to do the same.

But watch it first with your wife and kids. When the advice comes at the end, try telling them to disregard it. When they say, "Fuck you!", say a prayer of thanks to God that you raised kids smarter than their parents.

I hope the mother in the video store did too. I'm not hopeful. People rent Will Ferrell's "Taladega Nights" thinking it a documentary about NASCAR instead of yet another inconvenient truth. At least I'm sure it isn't a Paramount Classic and it will certainly be on cable here before Al Gore's scary and very important truth is.

See "An Inconvenient Truth".

XML or JSON? Experience or Enthusiasm

Tim thinks it is over. XML wins by virtue of wider applicability over JSON's ease of application. There is something ironic in that but let it be.

It is never over. Generation follows generation and the hardest thing to pass on is experience. Each generation thinks it is smarter than the one that precedes it and the enthusiasm that comes of believing in a simpler solution winning over a complex one leads to adoption, fielding and a certain witlessness with respect to the complexity of the real requirements. That tension is the source of the wobbliness in truly open systems.

It's never over until the system dies. I stopped worrying about that one a decade ago when the much smaller and much simpler specification hit the floor when The Brave Eleven believed they were making the web safe from the legions of much more complex standards without acknowledging a ream of many more and much larger specifications would follow to close the gaps.

One generation follows another. The real victory is not that this or that technology triumphs, but that in the wobbliness one hears the sound of people all over the world speaking to one another across the gaps.

Merry Christmas! Where there is a Santa Claus, we believe in simpler answers. Where there is only a Christmas spirit, we find the hope that belief is enough to get us to next year and that it perhaps will be easier than this one, or richer, or more filled with love. One year follows another. As long as that is so and we are here talking about, it is.

Clay Shirky: On SL and VRML History

Clay isn't much of a fan of 3D and that's legendary. On the other hand, I can't quarrel with his skepticism regards SL. SL seems to be to real-time 3D on the Web what Netscape was to HTML browsers and may be headed for the same fate as the fad wears.

IBM's entry into the market is more serious. They see the same markets that some of the 3D veterans have known were there. The value of the interface is precisely that it engenders the sensation of presence, what the old simulation experts referred to as the power of onset cues to the human brain. So as a collaboration medium for work at a distance, it is better and possibly cheaper, maybe even more reliable than video conferencing.

Then you have to consider the 'off the web' markets. For example, the music industry can't seem to figure out how to keep CD sales from sagging although their immediate demise is exaggerated. The Wal-Mart economy can be bootstrapped by packaging music wrapped in 3D which any gamer can tell you is the cheapest 3D surround sound engine there is. This takes advantage of the phenomenon that once a luxury becomes a feature, it becomes a necessity. The technical aspects of this are easy and the production costs are the dilemma (3D content isn't cheap to build no matter who says it is). Products such as VCommunicator from VCom3D indicate what the military or Berlitz can do with the technology given good authoring tools. If you’ve ever sent any of your employees to India or China or brought them here, you know that the faster you can get past the cultural and language barriers, the faster you can get down to business and the better the results.

What SL and IBM indicate is that 3D is here to stay in various forms. It never went away. Clay was dead wrong about that and probably did give bad advice, but skepticism about the imminent second coming of the web in 3D is healthy. As yet another entertainment offering, it will have a season. As technical innovation in that market, consider it Technicolor or Panavision which had their day and passed into history as digital production overtook 35mm film, but people seldom go back to black and white except for art flicks.

Now it is a matter of smart money, branding and IP. Of those, the third is where the real trouble will start. Despite what Clay said about VRML being dead, there is only one real world-accepted standard for real time 3D. It is the ISO standard for X3D, son of VRML.

What remains to be seen is what the smart money will do about the existence of royalty-free unencumbered international standards for a technology they wish to burgle. If history is a judge, some analog of the W3C which burgled SGML from ISO to create XML will be tried. OTOH, Rome having been savaged once has had the time to get ready for the return of the Celts.

The Cost of Ultra

The ever rising costs of Ultra are not being managed.

Ultra: I’m using this term to denote sophisticated and densely populated hypermedia content such as a 3D world with sound, textures, texts. Today Joe Web Page mashes slices of other content from open libraries and from sampling fixed media such as CDs, scans of photos, Google-selected images and so on. Tastes for sophisticated content lead to burglary just as the protagonist of Anthony Burgess’s novel, "A Clockwork Orange" committed. When finally faced with the content owners as with Alex’s determined old woman, mashup artists are faced with the same kinds of suits that loop-sampling rap artists have contended with. Tastes for Beethoven have to reckon with the costs of orchestra production eventually.

For Ultra, virtual reality is a bell weather. Free user-generated content simply can’t sustain the market emergence. Between the time and skills required and the licensing costs of the wrapped high quality content (e.g., music, photos, animations), either Creative Commons has to become the rule or the user-generated content approach can’t sustain these sites without the kinds of deals CBS made with YouTube. This only works where the money to produce the originals is managed and provided as CBS does or as Linden Labs was doing before the CopyBot scandal. Without it, Joe Web page content lives in the content ghetto. If he releases the work to the web, he gets a short burst of attention but it will be quickly de-assembled and recompiled into the works of others in the ghetto. Worse, if the samples are linked to and mashed into other works, Joe assumes all of the risks while the link pirates have no legal obligations at all and can still profit.

The tensions between technologists receiving a disproportionate amount of the income generated by the user content on the web and the authors are rising. The ‘information wants to be free’ camps won’t admit that they are the shills for the rape of the content economy. Mark Cuban, Tim O’Reilly, Joi Ito and the rest of the “share your content but we keep our Porsche’s” face a 1950s redux of the revolutions that destroyed third world economies and turned the Soviet Union into a group of smaller nations unable to maintain their technologies or lifestyles just as the main body, Russia, became a gangster state. To be fair: O’Reilly did pay for articles published on his sites in stark contrast to others who go so far as to take technical list emails and republish them as branded articles in their web magazines. Yet the ravenous appetite of the web for content is orders of magnitude larger than TV, radio or cable.

When I look at what is required to build even a moderately sophisticated 3D immersive album as I’ve been doing, I remember what we said after IrishSpace: no one will do this for free for long. On the other hand, this is precisely what the major record labels need to sustain CD sales. 3D is not just for the web. What the web did was make the technology cheap to obtain but if the content is to be high-quality, production costs are already at rock bottom and distribution control in the form of fixed media remains stable. That is the dilemma facing the technologists who up to now have been taking the majority of the profits. They need the licenses for the content, Joe Web Page can’t manage it, and the Middle Guys can.

It sucks but there it is. Ultra content does not want to be free. It wants to be managed.

Why X3D is Looking Better and Better

Nick Carr writes:

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/avatars_consume.php

That’s a heckuva good argument to move away from the server farm concept and back to the peer-to-peer concept using open technology for metaverses. It will take the press a while to catch up to this. But this means there is a negative pressure on the Electric Sheeps of the industry that they may not feel yet.

and he's right again but doesn't see the pragma of the conclusions:

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/curtains_for_mu.php

That’s a heckuva good argument for the immersive album concept. Music in and of itself (the mp3) is simply too easy to duplicate, so as the complexity barrier lowered, so did the cost per duplication unit (the cost of production dropped as well but has hit the bottom as hours to produce and record are now squeezed into their labor cost minimums).

If the labels want to sell more CD units, they need to package more content on the CD to make the package more attractive and slightly harder to duplicate for distribution over the web. CD copying itself will still thrive but that’s ok. This one is easy to sell to the labels given access. This means the Electric Sheeps of the world will try to beat the rest of their competitors to this market. If history is an example, their initial public reactions will be to pooh pooh it while quietly moving on it, then putting out a lot of ‘we really invented it’ press.

There is an opportunity here. Speed is of the essence for the first movers.

On Making Money On The Web

Someone writes to me complaining that a site that 'gives away the music of bands to make money for bands' is not promoting the art, just trying to make money. Well, so far giving away music hasn't made me as much money in ten years as playing in a local nightclub for one night. Maybe I just don't know where to leave the virtual tip jar or what the web's versions of "FREEBIRD" and "SWEET HOME ALABUMMER" are.

If it makes you feel any better, I’ve seen some posts on other lists where that same question is asked. It seems your generation is just waking up to the fact that you are not communists, just poor capitalists. The web was founded by pirates (not the Internet; it is a technical accomplishment of DoD, DARPA, and universities), but the web and it’s culture is founded on piracy and piracy makes it go. Some are just waking up to the fact that this is a race to the cultural bottom but it has made some who think programming made them smarter richer. They can’t create content so they steal it and they are applauded by the generation before them that created the web by stealing technology and standards from others and were applauded for it by a generation of big company software and solutions vendors who stole their designs from the universities, DoD and other companies. From TimBL forward, it’s been burglary and shameless self-promotion and now that is the shape of the WWW as inspired by its founders. It was a witless fielding and we will live the cultural effects of their witlessness for many years to come.

Those who can make content do. Those who can only program steal content. Those who can neither program nor make content buy it from the makers, the pirates, or steal it from both. The allure that is the web in your generation was rock ‘n roll in mine. A lot of us gave it a whirl only to discover there is only one Beatles, one Elvis, and one Rolling Stones. That was our race to the bottom as we tried to duplicate their success. The founder of the Beatles was killed by an insane fan, the founder of the Rolling Stones was killed by his carpenter, and Elvis killed himself. Everyone around them are doing very well and living comfortably on their reputations, not their current work. Money won’t make you talented or a genius. It will buy you comfort. Full stop. See Clockwork Orange.

All the gold in California is in a house in the middle of Beverly Hills in somebody else’s name…. The Gatlin Brothers

You can still make money honestly but you have to have a lot of patience, perseverance and willingness to sweat and risk. You have to control production, guard products, sue the living hell out of anyone that screws you, be faster than your competitors, cut profit to the bone if that is what it takes to get the deal, never ever buy the business, but in some cases, wipe out competitors by any means legal that you can live with. That’s capitalism: only money matters.

If you don’t want the money, live as a Hotei. Make sure your wife and kids are Buddhist monks as well. Otherwise, quit trying to sell ideals about how much better you can make the lives of others when in fact what you need to sell are services so they can make their own lives better by smartly applying the services they pay for. Do recognize a scam when you see it if even in the mirror. In this life, God helps those who help themselves. Helping others is what you do for the next life wherever that may be but you do it in this one so you pay for it by different currencies at different times. It may be free labor, it may be cash, but it is always something of value and the values are yours, not the person or person’s to whom you give. If you give, give without thought of reward. Otherwise, it is a scam.

Or take up an art form and practice it. It is all practice. You are never done. That’s why it is the fun thing and the long-lived thing if you are self-preserving enough to keep the world from killing you. You don’t ever have to quit. You may have to accept that at some point, you are no longer notable. That’s ok. You will find that if you last that long, you no longer care to be noticed because your eyes have turned outward and you have the same relevance to a culture full of pirates as a mirror on a wall has to a room full of debutantes.

Not Notable?

I had just finished replying to someone who was complaining that the voting systems for DIGG are too easily gamed when I read the Washington Post article linked in the title of this post. The hilarious bit is gaming DIGG is yet another way to game Google. It didn't take the Internet very long to catch up to Hollywood ad agencies in their techniques for shameless promotion, but heck, the one thing that is true about the web is that feedback systems speed up the race up the learning curve even if they also accelerate the race to the bottom of the cultural pool.

But take comfort those of you who feel you have labored all of your lives in obscurity. J.S. Bach was not popular in his day, never had a better than a third-rate gig, and the works of his son were more popular. In fact, a man whose music today puts him in the great three (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms) would have been forgotten altogether had Beethoven not taken up his cause some centuries after the death of J.S. Bach.

So if like Kirk, you are passed over for the top job even with all of your honors because of the blemishes on your reputation, take heart. In 100 years you too may be the 'best starship commander in the history of the Federation' that is WikiPedia. Or maybe in a 100 years, they'll say "wiki what???". In a voting system where there is no identity management and all decisions are short cycle decisions, that's simply life among the mammals.

In Defense of Complexity: The End of Joe Web Page, the Desperate Hacker

The modern combustion engine is a marvel of engineering in terms of the power to weight ratio for the efficient use of fuel. The principles are as simple as they have been since the end of the era in which it was invented now two centuries past: air, fuel, fire. If the internal combustion engine has these in the right mixture, it works.

As little as three decades ago, the average backyard mechanic could take one down to spare parts and put it back together if he or she had the time, the tools and the nerve, although to do it easily, one has to go back almost seven decades and then the principles which made it work weren’t that well understood in their implementation. Understanding and implementation have to scale out together but at some critical juncture, optimization of one of the applied principles will cause the complexity of the implementation to exceed the reach of the understanding.

So it is with the modern combustion engine: it works, it is efficient with respect to the power delivered for the fuel and the weight of the overall vehicle, thus adding more efficiency, but it is not something that the average backyard mechanic can rebuild. The tools required, the parts required and the knowledge of how they work in combination exceed his or her resources, understanding and nerve.

Complexity is just as much in the nature of the evolution of systems as simplicity is desirable. At some point, the demands of an environment or a market require complex solutions. While simplicity is a goal, it can also become a religion just as harmful as fundamentalism when pursued with a sword. Complex systems can do what simple systems cannot do. The goal that all systems be accessible can be met with open standards, but the goal that they be powerful, workable and light might not even as the principles over which they are built remain the same.

As I look at XAML, I know this design because it is the same markup design that the US Navy MID committee proposed for a notional browser twelve years ago. The winner was HTML. History has shown that HTML is to the MID what Henry Ford’s A-model and T-models were to a modern combustion engine: durable, affordable and fixable by the average web hacker, but ultimately also dirty, harsh on the environment, and not evolvable past some set of requirement for complex presentation and interaction. It is possible that with Vista and XAML, we are witnessing the end of the HTML-basic browser systems and staring at the fundamental weakness of the argument that Jean Paoli made to me in the hallway in Vancouver so many years ago and Tim Bray has been the champion of ever since: “It must be easy!”

Why must it? Perhaps that is true at the emergence of a technology, but then professionals take up the task because the job itself has changed. As with the fire, fuel air mixture that makes an internal combustion engine run, the fundamentals of URI, markup and objects are still the basics for web hypermedia, but the balance is shifting away from the primacy of fixed markup or the “Any color you want as long as it’s black.” browser to the primacy of variant markup by variant objects instead of a “faster horse”.

It is obvious that a sea change is upon us. It is obvious that this same change happens in all technologies in response to environmental and market demands. What is not obvious is how long it will take the once pioneering spirits grown stodgy in their success to realize that their principles where once the fuel for their personal and professional success are now the dirt in the modern engine of progress in need of cleaning. What we are seeing is the dawn of the modern professional web and the end of the backyard Joe Web Page. It's about time.

UFOs: The New Judas Goat for the Web

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2005/11/17/ubiquitous-findable-objects.html

Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, extols a world some of us have been pondering for awhile. In my case, first as a means to make a virtual reality world more fun and real, then as a tool for real time monitoring and simulation for public safety systems.

Morville wants a world more dreadful than I thought I could imagine because a world I could imagine and did, he actually wants.

That means we are at the tipping point of unwisdom.

If IA and ambient findability are his goals, he has found a perfect Judas Goat. A prediction is quite easy. Collision detection, real time asset tracking, GPS to the map, querying from inside the application by through use of proximity emergent situations, these are all the favorite topics of the real-time 3D community, aka, Virtual Reality. This is now the faovrite topic of the security service companies and the public safety companies. IBM will push hard for standards for the 3D Internet, and these technologies will merge in the new Internet made possible by higher bandwidth technologies.

At the same time, technologies will be developed to shield some from the views afforded by others (it's easy to do using the fact of the update protocols for MU views), and some will have full access for the right price or the right political position. The Chinese will be unhappy if their people can see what the Americans are doing, same for some Muslim emirates, and so on. Laws will be discussed and past about the requirements of full fidelity or merely representational models at the coordinates of meatspace (can a VR map of New York still have the Twin Towers?) and so on.

Life will become a game in an ever more real and simultaneously virtual sense. Just as the filtering and bias of other media today enables warping of decisions made, this will drive it even more incredibly to believe the unbelievable and accept the unacceptable. So perhaps this new ambient findable world is the ultimate tool for the Overton flush.

Knowing a bit about how the machine grinds, Morville will soon be a favorite speaker at conferences that the TLA organizations fund and attend (say XML 2007, Semantic Web, etc.). Meanwhile, others will claim to have thought of all of this first (see Intergraph's new CTO, Peter Batty) and some will be implementing the prototypes as products slowly and others will be hooking up the ground-up technologies that emerge from the open technical lists. For example, searching out of an X3D world through the SAI is not a difficult problem. The problem is sorting the query return into something representable in a 3D world (not just text) and how complex that representation can be (Eg, does a screw have screw behaviors) and who's semantic definitions are applied (it's expensive to keep a world of very local behaviors instead of standard ones).

But that is future. For now, it is just real time tracking of tagged assets. As a small company wrote in their literature at the beginning of the 3D web, circa 1993-94, "Our products are used by the security agencies to track criminals and fight crime. Criminals use our products to manage warehouses and track assets."

Welcome to a civilization of pirates.

Nightmares and Analysis

I was sitting in our then CEO of Intergraph Public Safety's office before he was ousted by the current gal holding his job and explaining why I was so livid about Bush's speech at the UN which made it very clear that Bush was going to take us to war in Iraq. I was frustrated by the bloggers I was reading some of whom I knew personally who supported this, and I was angry in a way I am uncomfortable with given my right wing colleagues and boss who kept insisting this would be a short profitable war, that we would get their oil, they would welcome us, Saddam was evil and we are the good guys and what about the Kurds, and on and on. They saw the war in the same mythology and terminology as they see the Iron Bowl contest between Alabama and Auburn every year. With the exception of my boss and CEO, none had a memory old enough to include the debacle known as VietNam. Even if they did, they were of the ilk that 'Hippies and the liberal media lost the war'.

I said, "Doc, these people don't live in a historically real country, they have hundreds if not thousands of years of grudges to settle, and our only reason for being there is oil. This is a booty raid. You know that but you don't have a child old enough to fight it but he may be by the time this turns into the civil war because that's what's going to happen. We'll bust Saddam's chops, have to set up shop there, then all of the dozens of sides, sorry there are more than two, are going to start shooting with us in the middle. We'll have to pull out and then they'll have a proper civil war. At the end, whoever is left standing will sell their oil to the Chinese."

He looked at me incredulously as only the Brits can when their conversation is with a redneck primitive and asked, "Do you REALLY believe that, Leeeeen?"

"Yeah, Doc, I do. I've seen this movie before. It ends badly for us."

I was never a popular guy at Intergraph and wasn't bothered by that. An analyst makes the case, watches the decision makers do what they do, then analyses the results. He lost his job to someone more ambitious than he is, and she may lose hers when the risky behaviors of her direct reports come to the surface as the new owners evaluate their internal management problems, and so it will go. As an analyst, that will be studied and factored into the next study. Ad nauseam. It won't change anything until the culture of having one set of rules for one group and nothing but 'positive relationships' for the others changes into a company where the employees respect their managers for their fairness and even handed approach, as well as their insistence that the policies HR publishes are something they are bound by themselves. It could happen.

As for Iraq: this is not precisely VietNam. When we finally withdrew, we left a country where the outcome of the civil war was not in doubt, where there really were essentially two sides and ours was losing because it had no legitimate mandate from the population, where democracy was as it is in Iraq, something the people don't care that much about, but with the major difference that other than its people, it has little of value that the rest of the world cares about. The Middle East has a very different history with respect to its conquerors and with how it tolerates that. They don't tend to want to do business with them three decades hence.

Iraq has a different basis in religion. Most of all, it sits on a sea of oil that the rest of the world covets. In VietNam, we could withdraw reasonably confident that no other major power was going to screw around in there because there wasn't that much to gain.

In Iraq, that simply isn't true.

I'll pray for the Iraqis, but my analytical instincts are pessimistic. One thing the cops teach: a domestic violence call is the most dangerous of all. We can call for backup and work our way out, but the conditions that make it violent will not change as long as there is power to be had or money to be made from the sea beneath the desert. If we want to win the war on terrorism, we need to work as hard as we can as fast as we can to take out its engine. They will still kill each other over their history, but we can remove the reasons for the rest of the world to care past decent compassion for the suffering of the innocents there.

If we have the time... and that is where my worst nightmares come from. In America, we need to think about the rules we say we live by. Prior to Iraq and after the Mexican War, we have not been a modern country that practiced first strike warfare. In Iraq we allowed ourselves to be led to break a rule that keeps us out of the small wars that lead to the big wars. When we broke that rule, effectively our leadership made the case that for their party, there are no rules by which we will conduct business legitimately. This is a problem for any culture because it is the road to indecency, to infidelity, to loss of life, talent, skill, and the will to succeed. It turns a nation or a company into a collection of "show up when expected and do the minimum necessary to take home the booty", and as both of the subjects here should know by experience if not analysis, that is how companies and countries fail often led by precisely the same kinds of people with exactly the same goals.

Qui bono? No one. Nada. It's a wasteland.

Trust The Rules

Someone was discussing confusion with the stories in the Old Testament of the Bible tonight. I wrote a reply. If you don't care for religious statements of faith, you should skip this entry.

If one is a literalist, the Bible offers plenty of contradictions to confuse one. The old testament God is a vengeful wrathful God who destroyed whole cities, brought down plagues, and distributed misery in plenty to all. The covenant in the old testament is an exclusive covenant with the Jewish people, not a covenant with all of man.

On the other hand, if one is a biblical historian well acquainted with the means, times and people by which the modern canon came to be, one knows the Bible is not the literal word of God in printed form, but multiple texts from multiple times created by multiple personages named and unnamed with different purposes and intentions for their works.

That these are two irreconcilable points of view is uncontested and what contests there are have resulted in even more misery and suffering on the people of the world. Of all wars, religious wars are the most violent and useless for one takes away no lesson but death and no reward but suffering. Jesus wept. That is why.

If one is a person of both faith and science, there is a third view. If God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, then being in all times and places with all knowledge and power, nothing of God is beyond God. If all that is so, all that there is, is God and God is in all of that. When God made this world, he set down rules that we must live by. Gravity, weather, the limits to our lives, their endings in death, the colors of our skins, our gifts and our shortcoming, all are of God and all are in God. If the rules for us are God’s rules and God is in those rules, God does not violate those rules for to violate those rules is to violate God.

It is as if one had a boss who sets one set of rules for the employees but lived by another set for himself. A boss like that may have power but would get no respect, only fear.

Do you think God is like that boss? If all is God, does he fear himself? Does that make any reasonable sense?

At one time, some did think that and they wrote down stories and these stories became the old testament that is one part folk legend, one part history of the Jewish people, and one part holy truth, but you have to know what you believe and trust your belief to know which is which. That is the challenge God sets for us in the Bible because by giving us free will, he gave us the responsibility to choose which is which. God can break these rules for his creation just as you and I can put wholly discordant and bad sounds in our compositions, but we do not because that would violate their beauty and because that beauty is of us, it violates us. For God to do so is to do so is to violate our trust in him and to do that is violate his covenant with us.

Why did Jesus come as a baby and not a man or an all powerful king as some who studied the old testament believed he would? Because he was promised as a savior not a conqueror, a teacher, not a master. His covenant with us is to love us, not to use us or abuse us. To make a new covenant, a covenant of love for mankind thus to be loved by all of mankind, God proved that he would live as man, know what a man knows, feel what a man feels, taste what he tastes, and die as a man. Because of this sacrifice, no man can say to God, “you are almighty, why do you torment me, you have no understanding of me, just wrath”.

The God of the new testament says, “I gave my only begotten Son, and he is now your intercessor for he knows what you know and so do I. He is the proof of my promise, the gift of my love, and the way to your own salvation, not because I make it so, but because you choose to let me make it so. That is how a covenant of love in God, in marriage, or in life is realized: by living under one set of rules for all which none violate without violating themselves.”

Such a love is not hard to understand. We are God’s creation. God exults in creation. Give voice to this. When we sing, when we compose, when we come together, that is all we need to understand. We feel our love for each other and thus God knows we exult in his creation, and through this, is made glad.

Polyanna wasn’t wrong. Be glad for God loves us and that makes loving each other very simple. Trust the rules.

An HTML for Web 3D

http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=42704&src=site-marq

This must be hot news. Bad Irving was touting it, and now the Australian press.

WE NEED AN HTML FOR 3D ON THE WEB.

We've had one since the mid 90s. It was VRML then and it's X3D now. Of course, Linden Lab's Phillip Rosedale knows that. Rosey calls VRML "The academic 3D on the web" blithely bypassing his own failures are Real and promoting his raging success with SecondLife. IBM knows it but IBM watched Intel and Microsoft lose to a small determined group of 3D whiz kids with their mits on the ISO standard committee.

Now it is time for them to rewrite history, or at least publish enough articles to force PageRank to return their articles whenever anyone searches for 3D Web Standard. This is piracy of course, but that is what companies out to take the intellectual property out of the open market into their own portfolios do.

IBM is about to spend $100 million to chase this down. In the Web3D Consortium, we’ve had companies come after us before including Microsoft and Intel. If they played on our turf, they had to play fair and they did not like that. We survived it. This is different. This is the press and Linden Labs plus IBM coming to take the whole enchilada with false history being spit out at a high frequency. Pirates know how to take a community apart. They are pushing these articles for a reason: PageRank locking (the use of frequency and timeliness to pull the search engine toward them without buying the search terms).

I do hope people are ready for this. The best thing you can do from your desk is every time you see one of these articles, correct the author immediately before it disappears. Be sure to include two items: X3D is royalty free and is the ISO standard for web 3D.

Two things happen: 1) People read the rebuttal and those that don’t want to do business with IBM and LL or want to compete with them may come our way. 2) The search engines won’t go into a PageRank lock condition where all of those articles create a pull toward the propaganda.

It’s wrong to fool Mother Nature, but it is dammed easy to fool Google and once done, not difficult to fool everyone else. All you have to do is keep lieing until it becomes the accepted truth. See Clockwork Orange.

Irving: the 143 Fastest Gun in the East

http://irvingwb.typepad.com/blog/2006/11/an_unusual_meet.html

Irving is yet another pundit enthralled with the new innovation called 3D On The Web. He seems to think standards will help and IBM is ready and working to create them.

Hooah!

Without the IP restrictions, of course. IBM doesn’t work on anything where they don’t own at least three critical patents. Working with standards organizations that already have and have had for the last decade open standards and running code is not what the IBM strategists want. They need bloggers to help them create a new history in which the old one didn't happen. Everyone learned the game from the web pioneers and now they are going to play it.

You better be ready to fight for it. With Linden Labs as the proxy, another wave of companies are about to claim the right to dictate the future of real-time 3D and VR. And just as Nicole said about O.J, they “will get away with it”. Why? The masses followed the press to get the facts. The press follows the money, not the facts. The web claims to have a higher moral majesty but the reality is, it is loose as a goose and ready to fleece anyone who buys into its mythology. Legends of wealth ‘just beyond the horizon’ are what the bandits who live out there use to get you into that wagon westward ho. And so it goes.

History is one subject in the humanities curriculum that technologists benefit from by mastering it. Unfortunately, the classes are filled with future lawyers in love with themselves and what they are about to obtain by legal means. That is why a lawyer is usually worse than a criminal. A criminal knows what he is doing is crooked; a lawyer knows it is merely unethical and immoral and he can afford to pay a blogger to get him out of that one just as Al Capone used to pay the Chicago press to write flattering stories about his soup kitchens that he closed as soon as the articles were published.

Yes, 3D on The Web is real alright. And it is the same old reality we've been facing On The Web that we've faced off of it; just faster. Sad, but so.

What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor?

An issue is emerging in several blogs and technical lists on the topic of expectations for backward compatibility of document formats on the web. At XML.COM, David Peterson rebuts a Popular Science article about a digital ice age when future archaeologists cannot decipher our current times because of our choices to publish documents in digital formats on digital media.

The long lifecycle argument has been occurring for at least three decades in computer systems circles and was one of the reasons for the success of markup systems. It only has so much mileage because static data is not enough to ensure behavioral fidelity on recovery unless behavioral semantics are stored as well. In the long lifecycle, we know that knowledge does get lost and the medium may not make a difference. Some of it can be recovered if smart people put their minds to it. The recovery of Egyptian hieroglyphics is an example. On the other hand, the library of Alexandria is gone forever.

Shorter lifecycles are immediate problems. The seas for successful products are both smoothed AND made rough by the intersection of competition for improvements and standards for interoperable information. Expectations for backward and upward compatibility vary by product and worse, are violent in the expectations for products that are distinct but familial. Success can be the worst thing that happens to a young band and the worst thing that can happen to a young application. As it was for Egyptian scholars, the history of media and medium can be cruel indeed. It pays to keep a sober head.

A thread is going on the X3D/VRML lists regards VRML 1.0. It was a successful format but not a very capable one. It was 'the simplest thing that could possibly work' and because it was a static model without behaviors, the vendors and the community moved on to VRML97. Then the bubble burst, history has been rewriten since (SecondLife Invents the Metaverse! yeah, whatever...) for the purpose of marketing new applications.

So history, format and application do force some formats out of mainstream use but in the case of the web, NOT OFF THE SERVERS. The dilemma in VRML/X3D is that even with the new X3D format as the third generation of the language, there are a significant number of VRML 1.0 files on the servers. There are no usage statistics but they are still there. The question is, should an author/owner of these files expect the new players to support them?

In the database community, data conversion costs are accepted as a fact of business when a new system replaces an old one. It is priced into the contract. On the other hand, HTML, VRML, SVG, etc are documents. We expect those to keep working in a backwards compatible mode of operation particularly if they were wildly successful in their initial fielding. As a result, HTML design hyteresis is legendary in its impact on the evolution of the language. Design camps have bifurcated into different languages with familial relationships and the (X)HTML browsers have to support them all XML's draconian parse not withstanding. The result: an HTML browser is the exemplar of bloat and script drudgery.

There are no conclusions because the decisions vary by situation. Some observations:

1) Initial fielding of the 'simplest thing that can possibly work' coupled with 'wild success' has consequences. Like an early young marriage, you may outgrow it and face an expensive divorce or an uncomfortable life later.

2) Expectations of databases and document systems are different, but the Internet and WWW system create a hot zone where these requirements overlap. Language by language, we are facing different decisions made by different vendors at different times that will make interoperation in mashups and aggregate documents problematic at best and highly failure prone at worst. What is thinkable and unthinkable varies by situation. Forget the Overton; look at the budgets.

The outcomes for languages and requirements for vendors are left to the reader to work out. Let me put it this way: Microsoft has no reason to fear that it won't have a secure future.