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Whatever the platform whatever the device, however mobile, however not, the trend has always been for ever faster graphics technology, ever higher resolutions, more and more colours; just more and more. However, a revolution has very slowly been creeping up on the unsuspecting digital world at least since the turn of the millenium. eReaders, using electronic paper for their displays, offering page refreshs of more than a second and anything up to 16-level grey scales, certainly no colour, are becoming a real commercial proposition. There are something like thirty of them currently on the market and eBook sales are the fastest growing sector of the publishing industry. Amazon’s Kindle seems to be the best selling.

eReaders do offer some advantages over traditional displays: they are easily read in bright sunlight; once a page is displayed they don’t consume any more power until the next page is required; one eReader can hold hundreds of eBooks for you at any one time. If you like books and reading and don’t want to play graphics intensive video games then they might be for you. Actually, that said, there are almost certainly hundreds of millions of people that have and will find them very appealing. eReaders are an example of slow technology: technology for reflection and contemplation, technology that slows time down, technology that won’t be rushed and, most importantly, technology that won’t rush you. This really is a revolution and it looks like it’s going to take hold.

As part of ongoing research, and for a future Blogzene article, I would be very interested to talk to any companies or freelancers who are developing content or applications for eReaders. I am interested in general ideas and motivations for exploiting the technology and not specific applications or IP. I would also be interested to talk to any of you out there who are eReader users and find out your opinions about them.

Please contact me, Clive Fencott, at p.c.fencott@tees.ac.uk if you would like to help me out here. Cheers.

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.

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