The Network Is The Client
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Fri, 07 Oct 2005 19:15:00 GMT
Just watched a demo from Mental Images, where a 3D visualization was rendered in real time on a server, and the resulting images streamed back to the web browser.
The images themselves were transmitted with lowres/hires pairs, so that when you stopped moving the mouse, you’d see a more bandwidth-intensive and pretty picture.
Now, this frees up the content owner to render from a scene that could possibly have gigabytes of data, while only sending small image files to the client.
But, really folks, it’s a nasty hack to make up for lack of client side 3D apis.
That got me to thinking, why don’t we have this? Ten years ago this summer, I remember sitting with the VRML dudes planning our new 3D future.
Didn’t happen. Here’s my theory:
At the time, the client was considered the “property” of client-side software companies. Thus, despite efforts at building consortia, the 3D plugins were developed and delivered as proprietary software which (partially) implemented a standard specification. Each software vendor wanted a proprietary advantage, and nobody opened their source. The business was never conceived of as something built atop an open, interoperable framework. It was culturally unsellable in a shrinkwrap software world.
It wasn’t just the wacky 3D browser world, it was more serious and potentially more useful technologies such as the now lowly Java applet.
Here’s what I think is coming. The business has moved from the browser to the server over the last decade, and all that money wants customers to have a great end-user experience. More importantly, a consistent end-user experience no matter what OS choice the user makes. So, we’ll fund Firefox and KHTML, sometimes with cash but more often with intellectual effort, to give us a better outlet for our businesses.
