Web 3D declared useless
Heh—a former coworker points to a Computer Graphics World article titled "Who Needs Web 3D?" that, as this former coworker points out, reads like something that would've been published four years ago (well, he said five years ago, but I disagree; I think five years ago was the peak of optimism in the VRML boomlet. We were putting together new versions of the Cosmo products; we were creating 3D web authoring tools that were going to take the world by storm (we even thought Cosmo PageFX might be a serious competitor to Flash); everything was great. It wasn't until maybe a year later that things really fell apart.) There were any number of articles back then that said exactly what this one says, only about the then-hot 3D-on-the-web technology, VRML.
"3D vendors overestimated the appeal of the technology and its true value"—check. "It all started a couple of years ago"—check. "3D tool suppliers, eager to expand into new areas, targeted the Web as the next untapped mother lode"—check. "People originally thought that 3D on the Web was going to be ubiquitous"—check. "The lesson was that to succeed, Web 3D developers had to use the technology to create compelling applications"—check. Yup, this article has it all. Too bad nobody was paying attention to all the other articles that said exactly the same thing four years ago.
The lessons we learned back in the Cosmo days are lessons that the industry seems doomed to repeat indefinitely (or at least until bandwidth and processing speeds become so high, and authoring tools so powerful, that 3D really is ubiquitous): nobody but geeks wants 3D for its own sake. 3D graphics are a means, not an end. 3D authoring is hella hard to do well. Bandwidth is low, and nobody wants to wait 20 minutes to download unnecessary 3D content. And so on.
I still think it's too bad. I still like pretty shiny 3D stuff. Some part of me still believes in the Glorious Cyberspace Future, despite all the difficulties of interfaces and lag.
But I'm not going to be betting on any 3D-on-the-web technology succeeding for a while yet.