What is Interactive 3D?

Interactive Kiosks- For museums/ exhibitions where a reasonably new computer with a £100-£200 graphics card can be setup to have special software and plugins installed. If you can reach your audience in this way then this is the easiest, most controlable way of producing interactive 3d. Examples of this are Cult 3D.

Interactive Internet- This presents a much greater challenge- to find the best solution for home computers made up of a large variety of hardware and software. Unlike e.g TV where there is a standard PAL format that you know will work 100% of the time. The easiest solution here is to produce a standard piece of software, the problem is that people don't like installing new software or plugins, if it doesn't work instantly you have probably lost your audience. Think of having a shop where you insist that shoppers spend 5 minutes giving you their personal details before they are allowed to look inside, a laughable idea, yet our competitors still produce interactive solutions that require plugin downloads (an easy solution for our competitors but a disaster for their customers).

Interactive Applications- These are applications (like computer game programs) that can be downloaded and used whenever the customer requires. They can work from the desktop without being 'installed'. The problem here is that waiting 5 minutes for a download and then risking running an unfamiliar program on your computer is going to put a lot of people off.

What format to use?

Flash (Papervision 3D)- Flash is the largest penetration for PC's, the problem is that the 3D side of things is very rough, basically open source libraries, so pretty slow and therefore expensive to develop. It is onvious that Flash will incorporate 3D at some stage but Adobe's track record with 3D is dismal. However there is a huge action script developer base which seems to be leading the way.

3D PDF- Acrobat Reader (version 7 and above) is installed on most PC's and has been able to show interactive 3d for about 3 years now. There have been massive improvements from Adobe's first (unuseable?) version. This format is most used for showing CAD models BUT it can be very expensive to add interaction to the 3D presentations. A downside of this format is that a separate (pdf) web page page needs to be opened to view the 3d content, research has shown that this tends to interupt the users 'browsing experience'.

Java Applets- Most computers use Java enabled Internet Browsers. Java (a programming language) is platform independent (including Windows, Unix, Mac OS and Linux). A Java Applet is a Java program designed to run inside a web browser. This solution gives the best/ easiest, 'it just works', end-user experience and is our prefered solution in most cases.
The latest development is JavaFX which provides much better video and graphics, there are still some issues here but we hope to use some of these new capabilities ASAP.
Java is also used on mobile devices (J2ME) and Interactive TV e.g BBC Red Button (Personal Java) but these are pretty limited/ specialized forms that don't currently support 3D interactivity.

The future

The dangers of predicting the future.
By 2009 wasn't everyone supposed to be walking around with cyber-goggles and feedback gloves? Hmm... just like everyone would be using video calls on their mobiles and texting would be obsolete. And no geeks would have bought an iPod or seen its sucess, obviously don't ask geeks to predict the future, ask the strategic marketing people instead. Now more than ever the customer leads the way and what they want is Technology for Dummies e.g the iPlayer (millions spent behind the scenes to give a smooth user experience).

Augmented reality (AR)- is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time. Example video.
At present this is mainly used with Papervision3D in Flash applications but it has also been ported to Java. This is real 'bleeding edge' technology that requires programing to put together. The question here is how many viewers have webcams? they are becoming more common but there is still a large audience percentage that will be lost if this is the only viewing platform.
The use of Wii controllers is another (better but again less inclusive) way of controlling AR. Example video.

Reality Server- this is currently only availible to software developers and is the brain child of Mental Images who are at the forefront of photorealistic CGI for film and visualization. The concept is that highend workstation servers hold and process the 3D data and then upload the images to the users computer. The advantage of this is that a quite old/ basic computer can use a highend computer to interact with 3D data. The disadvantage is that this is very expensive (one or two workstations per user). Cheaper/faster computers and internet connections will make this a 'commercial' option in a few years time.

We have a the ability to do something similar to this at the present, via server-rendering we can produce and send a customer a personalised movie from a java application run on our server.

Interactive 3d product display

Quick&Easy Interactive 3D

Click here to view this interactive presentation, which uses either pre-rendered (or filmed) images which are played back according to the mouse position.

Interactive 3d product display test

A client test sample.

Sticky Pages?

If we are talking about interactive 3D and future trends on the web then we must also analyse the current 'killer apps'- Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Web Radio, iPlayer, Second Life, Stumbleupon, Digg, iPhone apps, Mashups etc.etc.

Phew, were to start? (this section willbe updated when time allows) We are not web development company, as such, although we do bridge the gap from broadcast to online, mobile and iTV. However while researching 'interactive internet' we knocked out this web page, the idea was to collect/mashup free content and links into an interactive 'home page' or 'portal' that users would want to spend time on and return to (sticky).