Rick Botman’s Blog

Technologies to manipulate, communicate, display, capture, create (or ‘print’), and interact in three dimensions (including so-called 2.5D environments like VR or video games) continue to evolve, albeit more slowly than some expect.

As I have been looking at Autodesk, industrial design firms, Second Life, and Google SketchUp, I’ve run up against the wall of complexity that surrounds  3D data. Video games are probably the state of the art in how to simplify an interface into 3D data, but they necessarily constrain the degrees of freedom (I’ve never learned how to fly a plane, in first life or in second life).

So what systemic breakthroughs will lower that wall? Motion capture certainly has advanced game and animation development. Fly-eye lenses, construction of objects in 3-D space based on computational analysis of multiple 2D photographs (Microsoft Photosynth) seem to advance the data capture end of the problem.

I have to believe that AutoDesk spends a fair amount of energy thinking about file formats and communication protocols for 3D data, as the core value container subject to open/closed strategic considerations.

Cloud computing also has a 3D barrier of sorts - the rendering of 2.5D graphics in real time probably needs to happen next to the display, because of the bandwidth bottleneck to the end-user, the variety of display resolutions, and the need to decouple the rendering from the interface responsiveness. Which to me suggests that scalability in ‘overall 3D performance’ will be improved if there are standard protocols for describing and communicating 3D space that will allow graphics engines to be shared. Guess I need to read up on DirectX.

This is exactly the type of question that sends me off on a 3-hour, no blinking web surf, spinning out del.icio.us bookmarks and downloads. Let’s see what I come back with.