Top Enterprise Controversies of the 3D Web

Clearly I need to hang out with more 11-year-olds. 

Though society does frown on that sort of thing. 

Most visits I make to the cinema are with my 11 year old, and just about every single movie she sees is in 3D.

Kim - Has 3D caught on? Or is it a fad? Avatar came out in 2009, and the overwhelming majority if films are still in 2D. 

3D cinema took many years to catch on, didn't it?  If the 3D web can be faster and less clunky, why wouldn't it have huge appeal?

sort of related:

Security. Making sure that people can't bust into the system and mess it up, making sure that the system can't mess people's computers up, etc.

Identity. Who are you? How do you decide who gets to know about what parts of you? How do people get their bona fides to give them access (see Security). How do you shut yourself off from annoying people or annoying activities?

Maria - I've been hearing about how great 3D interfaces are since Second Life hit its first wave of popularity in 2006 -- remember that Anshe Chung BusinessWeek cover? That was six years ago, and the 3D Web seems no closer today than it was then. Indeed, it seems further away. 

You describe the Gartner Trough of Disillusionment. I see no reason to believe that the 3D Web or virtual worlds or whatever you call them will ever rise from that trough. 

Mitch --

The way I see it, you have to look at the games industry to see where general and business users are going to be in five to ten years.

And the games industry is bifurcating. We've got the casual, mobile and AR games. And we've got the huge, immersive, 3D games. The former are ubiquitous, but the latter are earning huge amounts of money.

Call of Duty made around $1 billion in its first two weeks, more than any other single entertainment product, including Avatar 3D. You can't call that a dead-end technology.

Immersive 3D games are, in fact, less efficient than 2D games. Anything you can do in 3D, you can do faster in 2D. Moving an avatar through city streets is slower and more difficult than moving, say, PacMan through a maze. 

But the benefit is that its more engaging and compelling.

There was a similar transition twenty years ago, when we went from DOS and command-line interfaces to graphical interfaces with icons and mice. Typing a command was faster than using a mouse, and I remember many folks dismissing the new GUIs as kids' games and threatening to die before they'd ever use a mouse.

But it's not just that 3D is more engaging. It also creates social ties.

I'd have a hard time telling you the folks I spoke to on the phone or emailed the past couple of weeks. It all blends together. But I remember the people I met face-to-face. 

And the folks I met in an immersive 3D environment -- I remember them as if I had met them in person, not as if I'd called them or Skyped them or emailed them. This makes a dramatic difference for such applications as collaboration, team building, mentoring or sales.

I don't think 3D will ever replace 2D. You're not going to want to drive around randomly looking for a store when you've got a phone book right there on your desk. Similarly, the Web is a great way to find information, communicate with people, and consume media.

Where 3D comes in, is that it allows us to share experiences that will increasingly feel more and more life-like. These are not competing technologies, but complementary ones.

And it will take time. Personally, I believe it requires someone to come out with a decent 3D-based operating system -- probably, first, for home entertainment systems, then for education, and finally for general use. (Following the same progression as 2D GUIs made.) It will also require a decent 3D browser, which we don't yet have, and a company or companies to step up and invest a great deal of time and money into marketing the platform. 

We'll get there eventually. And, I believe, it will change the way we work -- and do a lot of other things, as well -- even more dramatically than the Web did. 

Maria, I'm not seeing the need for this 3D Web for business, with the exception of training applications. It seems that everything you can do in 3D, you can do more easily using conventional tools, without all the baggage of 3D. 

The industry trend for the past half-decade or so has been in the other direction: With mobile devices, wireless, and the Internet of things, we're not going into cyberspace; we're bringing the Internet into the world and taking it with us. Advances like Google Glass and self-driving cars will only accelerate that trend, and leave virtual worlds further behind as a dead end technology that was fascinating for a while, like Gopher and magic lantern shows. 

Mitch --

I'm always keeping an eye out for use cases, but typically don't go after users aggressively unless I've got an assignment -- and users are much more likely to talk for a high-profile publication, like for my Network World piece last year:

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/061311-3d-conferencing.html

The vendors want to see their names in print, and they lean on their customers to talk.

There's only so many of these I can write though. We're at the bottom of the Gartner hype cycle for virtual worlds, and there's only so much interest in this technology, especially since everyone is focused on the big changes in the mobile space.

I think the interest will return once we have a usable hypergrid browser. Right now, all the work is happening behind the scenes, within corporate and government firewalls. The public-facing stuff is all in isolated islands -- lots of different social platforms, game platforms, etc... The public-facing worlds tend to be built on proprietary technology, are pretty expensive, and require that users create a new avatar for each one. You get burned out on avatar creation pretty quickly. 

I believe an easy hypergrid browser which will let people travel from world to world easily, a kind of 3D Netscape, will trigger the next growth phase. 

It doesn't look like we're there yet. But, for all I know, there's a kid in the basement somewhere finishing one up right now. 

The growth of the World Wide Web also coincided with the switch from DOS to graphical user interfaces, so folks were using the same input methods -- clicking their mouse on things -- both on their desktops and on the Web. I believe that helped adoption quite a bit.

Finally, the third leg of Web adoption was AOL, which sent disks to every man, woman, child and dog in the country. That was a massive marketing campaign to get folks to go online, and it also helped pave the way for the Web.

I think we need all three things to happen again -- or at least two of the three -- in order for the 3D Web to really take off. 

A good, easy browser. A 3D environment on everyone's desktop and a new user interface mechanism (hand gestures, maybe?). A big marketing push by someone would just be icing on the cake.

Until then, we're looking at a deployment here, a use case there -- not enough to build momentum or public interest. After you do one story about it, all the others sound the same. 

It's when you connect everything together that the sum becomes greater than the parts, and each new participant makes the networking more and more valuable. 

Maria, I was among those who was overenthusiastic about Second Life and VWs in 2007-8, and it's certainly possible that I've swung too far back in the other direction. 

In other news: Bah, humbug. 

We'd love it if you could share with our community examples of real-life VW implementations, when companies are ready to go public with them.