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At the very first WWW conference in 1994 there was a proposal for the 3D Web: interactive 3D for the web. It quickly turned into the Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) and for a while it was quite successful. All you needed was a text editor and a free plug-in. But neither VRML in particular nor the 3D Web in general really happened. This despite the fact that Microsoft(Chromeffects), Macromedia in partnership with Intel (Shockwave 3D), and Adobe (Atomsphere), to name a few, all built, and discarded, their own competing systems.

In an article in 2005, Tony Parisi, one of the co-creators of VRML said that now the time of the 3D Web had come in the form of X3D, an XML-based ISO standard. But the company he set up to exploit the moment, Media Machines, was taken over by Vivaty who are mainly interested in 3D social networking to compete with Second Life. Even now Google, Adobe and Mozilla in partnership with Khronos all have competing systems that offer 3D for the Web. Currently, 3D Links lists 70 3D Web technologies and Meta Mole lists and compares 30 based on a set of 25 functional requirements. The vast majority of these require their own plug-in running to view content.

Meta Mole was created by Teesside University’s Dlab as a result of their researches into 3D Web technologies. Their preference is for a game engine-based system called Blue Mars. The other technologies to watch include Viewpoint, Papervision3D, and Unity. The latter is another game development system that can create a whole range of 3D environments including iPhone and iPad as well as the Web and it’s causing quite a stir and not just in the games world: see ‘United They Stand’. Rubix Studios – recently set up by 4 Teesside graduates and based in Victoria Building – are firm believers in Unity for its powerful yet intuitive development environment and the ease with which applications can be tailored to a chosen run time environment. They have a number of impressive 3D web test environments running and are hoping their first iPhone game will be available in the near future.

While the dream of the 3D Web has never gone away it has never happened either. Sure, there is Second Life; and then there is … Yes, there is Second Life.

So, why? Where has it all gone so wrong?

Dominic Lusardi, managing director of Animmersion Ltd, an established content developer on Teesside, has been involved with the 3D Web since the days of VRML and thinks a major problem is having to install a plug-in in order to view 3D content. Many users, particularly corporate ones, have highly developed security concerns about their systems and won’t let the ordinary user install plug-ins at all. Many home users share similar concerns or are simply put off having to install yet another plug-in in order to view content that may not be of any interest to them.

From commercial experience Dominic also realises only too well the cost of developing interactive 3D content in the first place and the huge additional cost and risk of adopting a new technology to do so. The plethora of 3D Web technologies significantly increases this risk and it’s not one small companies want to live with.

The absence of a generic standard for 3D Web content and the need for users to install plug-ins is thus a major barrier to its adoption. Google, for instance, have O3D which in time might be embedded in its search engine technology but that is still some ways off and the fact that Mozilla has its own competing technology seems to reinforce the idea that competition at the level of content enabling technologies is simply stifling the establishment of a generic standard.

But perhaps the main reason why the 3D web hasn’t taken off is quite simply that it just isn’t what the majority of web users or content developers actually want; for the moment at least. There is something very direct and ‘real’ about a tweet or a thought posted on Facebook. Maybe the 3D Web introduces a level of artificiality that the majority of Web users don’t like; and the minority that do make Second Life the almost unique 3D Web success that it is.