Who needs Web 3D? (editor's note).(Industry Overview)(Column)

Pop singer Cyndi Lauper was right: Money changes everything. This has certainly been true in the computer graphics industry, most notably in the realm of 3D content creation for the Web. In the past year, as the sagging economy slowed the adoption of cutting-edge technologies, Web 3D--perhaps the most promising frontier of the CG industry--has fallen from mega star to bit player.

The latest research highlights this decline. In 2001, 3D software vendors reported that nearly 15 percent of customers were using their tools to create Web content, a whopping 175 percent upsurge from the previous year, according to market analysts at Acacia Research Group (ARG). Now, a year later, the same vendors state that fewer than 8 percent of their customers are doing so, a drop of more than 4-0 percent.

Why such a radical turnaround for Web 3D? Unfortunately, one of the main reasons, beyond the effects of a slumping economy, was that 3D vendors overestimated the appeal of the technology and its true value.

As with other problems relating to the Internet, this one should have been obvious. It all started a couple of years ago, when the traditional markets for 3D content--film, TV, and gaming--started getting saturated. And 3D tool suppliers, eager to expand into new areas, targeted the Web as the next untapped mother lode.

"People originally thought that 3D on the Web was going to be ubiquitous," says Samantha Staples, principal at ARG. "They were thinking, `We built it, they will come.'" But what they soon discovered was that the medium was not the message, that people were not clamoring for 3D for its own sake. The lesson was that to succeed, Web 3D developers had to use the technology to create compelling applications.

So that's what they did. One only had to attend the Web 3D Roundups held at recent SIGGRAPH conferences ...