Alan wrote:
> I don't exactly know the technical reasons why VRML is so much
>slower to render realtime than proprietary formats in games, but you know
>what - it really doesn't matter.
This has been a very difficult issue for me to accept. I know some of
the reasons VRML renders slowly, and my approach has thus far been to say
"it therefore behooves content creators to create content that works around
the limits of the technology." Which is good as far as it goes. But in
the end Alan is right, our audiences don't care about any of that -- they
just see that VRML isn't as fast or as slick as Doom, as complex or as
shadowy as Toy Story, or as pretty as Myst, and they say "Ho hum, why
should I care?"
The problem is that the reasons VRML renders slowly (particularly its
generality) are required for the kinds of things we want to do. Sure, if
we accept the Doom model we can tell interactive stories in beautifully
rendered fast 3D spaces -- but only if those spaces all have a ceiling and
a floor, and rectilinear walls, and conform to a set of predefined
behaviors.
Say you're someone like Picasso. You go down to the art gallery and you
say "I'd like people to buy my paintings." The gallery people say, "Okay,
paint me fifteen pictures of boats by tomorrow and I'll sell 'em all." You
say, "But wait! I don't want to paint pictures of boats! I want to paint
pictures of nudes descending a staircase! Oh, and I can't paint fifteen of
'em by tomorrow; my art requires time." The gallery people say, "Sorry,
there's no market for your work, better luck elsewhere."
This clearly isn't an exact analogy. But it does show that some of the
problems we're facing here aren't unique. Everyone could tell Picasso
"you're just making excuses; the fact is that your approach to art is slow
and doesn't live up to the beautiful boat scenes that other artists can
turn out." And from a commercial perspective -- or even a
popular-acceptance perspective -- they're right.
The main difference between that situation and ours is that we agree
that what the public is getting *is* higher-quality (display) than what we
can give them. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's better art.
It seems to me that speed is largely a technology issue. When we have
faster rendering, we'll be able to do VRML at better speeds. We'll never
catch up to the game market (this is where I disagree with John DeCuir's
attempts to make VRML a viable twitch-game platform), but once we can
display complex worlds at 30fps, we'll be able to pursue artistic and
storytelling goals without worrying about whether our special effects are
as good as Doom's. (Look at early black-and-white movies -- they certainly
didn't look much like reality (no color! jerky! no sound!), but people
liked 'em anyway.)
The other approach, of course, is to take what works and try to adapt it
to our needs. We can try to use the Doom engine to tell a compelling
story. We can render a series of still frames from 3DSM and produce
Myst-like games. We can do an awful *lot* of pre-rendering (and use
impossibly large amounts of disk space) and try to create interactive
movies that look like _Toy Story_. All of those things are viable options
while we wait for VRML to get where we want it to be.
There are other issues related to public acceptance as well.
F'rinstance, I just finally got a friend of mine who runs the Information
Science hall at a major science museum to look at IrishSpace. Her first
comment was, "I liked it, but it's not very interactive." (I had warned
her about that months ago, quoting the "radio play with VRML illustrations"
line, but I guess she forgot.) She wondered what the advantage was of
doing such a story as VRML rather than as a pre-rendered 3D movie. I think
that the interactivity that is there adds a lot, but I don't know if I
could convince my friend of that.
>2. "It runs unpredictably"
Is this any more of an issue for VRML than for Java and JavaScript?
There are a lot of platforms out there, with a lot of unpredictable
combinations of hardware and software. Even a company that does extensive
cross-platform testing can't hope to hit much more than the most popular
combinations.
This will get somewhat better when/if one browser interface becomes
better distributed. If Cosmo Player replaces WorldView and can get broader
distribution, if we ever ship our Mac version, if Chris Fouts finishes his
IRIX port, we'll be able to count on things looking and working much the
same on a variety of platforms. But that's a lot of ifs, and relies
heavily on one company (while ignoring other good browser options out
there), and still doesn't cover things like Linux and older Windows
systems. And X3D may mean starting the whole ballgame over again in terms
of browser distribution.
>The logfiles
>I've seen tell me that anywhere from 1/2 to 1/3 of the users who hit our
>ISS intro page go in and actually get the model file (one more click in).
How does this compare to other types of documents? I know that
clickthrough on banner ads is way down. Do people click thumbnails to get
bigger images? Do people visit Shockwave-based pages? (I never do,
because installing the plugin always seemed like too much of a pain, given
how few pages use Shockwave...) I just wonder whether this is an
atypically low percentage for this kind of thing.
>this
>is all tempered with a growing internal frustration with using plugins in
>general (Windows Media Player, Flash, and VRML).
So at least it's not entirely a VRML problem... Though I guess that's
not much comfort.
>I have since been
>delving into 3DStudioMax, Bryce3D and Rhino3D to better express what I was
>after - you can peek at a test image here (
>http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Orchard/3767/akscene1.jpg )
This is lovely, and I really hope that eventually VRML can provide an
image like that *plus* interactivity.
I dunno. I consider still images (in, say, Myst) to be a liability to
interaction, no matter how beautiful they are. But obviously the vast
audience out there doesn't agree with me -- look how well Myst sold.
>Cartoony avatars in primary-colored boxes won't ever be as
>appealing as texturemapped environments and beings.
I do think there's something to be said for cartoony, though. Look at
painting: there *are* a few people who do hyperrealist paintings, but most
painters don't bother -- you can get similar effects with a camera, with
far less work. Instead, painters try for other kinds of effects, more
suited to the medium. Nobody looks at lack of hyperrealism as a
*limitation* of the painting medium, even though it could be seen that way;
they consider it just one of the parameters. What if we think of low
polygon counts as just one of the parameters of doing compelling VRML work?
I love a lot of things about Delle Maxwell's Tenochtitlan world (the one
made to accompany the VRML Handbook), but I think my favorite thing about
it is the animated human figures. They're made of a few flat polygons --
they don't even attempt to look 3D. And yet they're recognizably *people*,
and they move in a 3D space. That's the kind of thing that I think VRML
can do reasonably well at the moment, and perhaps that's the kind of thing
VRML content creators should focus on until such time as rendering
technology catches up.
>4. "It has very little content out there that can be pointed to as useful
>or compelling"
Unfortunately, I suspect this is going to remain true for a while. But
to some degree I think we're still asking the wrong questions here.
A friend of mine wrote a hypertext story recently. I spent a lot of
time debating with her whether the story would've worked just as well in
linear form. But to a certain extent, that debate misses the point. When
we see a movie, do we ask "Wouldn't that have worked just as well as a
printed story?" When we read a book, do we ask "Wouldn't that have worked
just as well having a storyteller tell it aloud as we sit around the fire?"
Different media are different. Each has strengths and weaknesses.
The question of whether it's worth our time and effort to develop
stories in a given medium is a good one. I can't really address it from
personal experience -- unlike many of you, I haven't even *tried* to create
a story in VRML. I can say that I've been impressed by several of those
I've seen -- the Raven stories, IrishSpace, the rooms-and-chairs poem (I
forget who did that one), a few others. I can't say whether those pieces
would have been better in other media, but I can say I like them a lot in
the medium they're in.
> When I read the www-vrml list, I get hopelessly lost in the
>technical jargon
I don't think that's a problem (unless it makes you feel left out) -- in
my ideal world the artists don't need to understand the underlying
technology in order to use it. (Okay, they should understand how the
medium works -- a painter needs to know what happens when you mix colors.
But a painter doesn't necessarily need to know the chemical composition of
the paints, or make their own brushes from scratch.) Good authoring tools
(like high-quality paint and brushes) free the artist to create without
having to understand the details.
I was rather impressed with Cosmo PageFX when I first played with it a
month or two back, for this very reason. It not only hides the
implementation, it hides much of the VRML approach to doing things -- it
overlays an order/structure that better fits the heads of 2D designers.
It's still not trivial to use, but it makes a pretty good start at
providing a paradigm other than the techie one of routes and DEFs.
Unfortunately, it's largely geared toward banner ads... But it does give
me faith that good authoring tools will eventually come along. (Worlds --
far more powerful than PageFX -- does a lot less hiding of implementation.
I'm hoping that in future versions we can improve that.)
>I don't fully grasp the VRML-UMEL
This is actually something important for content designers to know
about. All it is is a library of prepackaged content (textures and sounds,
for instance) that people can download (or obtain on CD) independently of
any given VRML world. If the world designers stick to the textures in the
UMEL, then anyone who already has the UMEL doesn't have to wait for
textures to download -- they've got them on hand. Those who don't already
have the UMEL do have to wait for download, but they're no worse off than
if you used non-UMEL textures.
Of course there will always be reasons to use non-UMEL textures. But if
the UMEL really takes off (like if it's distributed with browsers, say), it
will help a lot with download times.
>especially have trouble grokking X3D...
You're not alone. Biggest problem with understanding it is that it
doesn't exist yet. The basic idea (as far as has been revealed so far), as
I understand it, is to break VRML up into pieces, which ought to reduce
browser size and make it easier to create custom applications that use VRML
without using a full VRML browser. That and possibly using an XML-like
syntax. (And from what I've seen of it, XML isn't all that much harder
than HTML -- certainly more complicated, but not so different as to be
incomprehensible. And we've got Len to help us out when we run into
trouble. :) )
>I'm just not that interested.
Entirely legitimate. No reason artists should have to be interested.
Just wait for the dust to settle and learn how to use the new technology to
best effect.
>That's what it's
>about for me - creative people bouncing ideas and stories off each other
>and sharing them with others.
Well, that's what this list is for, after all. :)
> Sometimes I feel like an artist in a room full of bureaucrats
There are other artists there too, and some people who overlap among
various functions. And a bunch of brushmakers. :)
>You know what I really miss - the contests like
>Cosmo's BUZZ WRL of the week. Seeing good stuff every week, spurring the
>competitive juices, and getting all sorts of ideas in that manner was more
>inspiring for me than any other event before or since.
I was rather disappointed with many of those pieces. Largely due to
speed issues, actually. The remains of that contest are still up on the
cosmosoftware gallery, and I looked at them the other day; the most
prominent one on display, the totally gorgeous Everglades (?) swamp scene,
renders at about 1 fps on my fairly fast system. Not good enough. Sigh.
--jed
