Is a 3D web more than just empty promises?

So you're saying the new 3D technology is the equivalent of Netscape, in 1995?
Yes. You will see a disruption of those proprietary businesses because there are now open ways to do the same kinds of experiences. For the user it's free, and for the developer it's almost free.

How are you taking advantage of what you see as this looming opportunity?
The dynamic I see is a lot of usage of rich media client applications, music players, video players, chat clients, integrated chat and gaming clients — what they spell is the end of the era of everything being delivered through a browser. That and the difficulty of deploying applications as plug-ins because of extra clicks required in SP2. We're seeing the hegemony of the browser coming to an end as the sole distribution vehicle and the user interface. And we're seeing an appetite for richer experience.

So how does this play into the market for 3D?
We believe 3D is going to be a better organizing principle for information. Take the social network. Go on Orkut and you've got all your friends, and the interface is absolute [junk]. It's tiles with pictures of your friends. There has to be a better way to organise that. My personal motivation to get into this in the first place was that I always thought it would yield a better way to present information. 3D is dynamic, it's broadcast quality. We're also going to see movement toward a TV-broadcast, video-game aesthetic to the presentation of information. Why haven't we done it so far? Because we couldn't.

What's the best 3D interface you've seen? Can you point to something in particular?
My favourite, which was presented in a VRML tech conference in 1998, was a visualisation of the workings of CERN's particle accelerator. The accelerator is a big honking thing, and you could fly through it, and within that you had a visualisation of what was happening at the physics level. You could see the particles streaming through. You had the abstract integrated with the concrete. It's about being able to combine the verisimilar with the abstract.

So to get this to work, you need to have a new generation of people who are thinking this way. Where are they going to come from?
That generation is coming out of the art schools knowing tools like 3D Studio Max, Maya, LightWave, and many of them are learning how to take their design skills to the Web, much the way Photoshop jocks learned how to develop for the Web when their jobs demanded it.

The next generation needs to have been raised on 3D user interfaces. And you've got that with gamers.
That's the best example of people raised on 3D interfaces. When you move one of your characters around in a 3D game, it already knows how to walk. In VRML, you could walk through the same space and not have any sense that you had any identity. No one did that level of design. You wouldn't hear the footfalls. So that has to happen.

The bulk of the interface design will come from [the] gaming community, with additional innovation through these proprietary 3D chat worlds. But in most of these chat rooms, there's nothing to do! You see someone's avatar, and they're picking their nose. It's a piece of glitz attached to text chat. In an application like Everquest you have exactly the same environment design and you're there to do something. There has to be a purpose.