Learned a lot, accomplished nothing
When I was a researcher, there used to be times when I would have that killer idea in my head. It was going to revolutionize the world and change the Internet as we know it. I still have those ideas in my head, however, I never managed to get them onto paper or, more appropriately, computer. The transformation from brain to anything concrete turned out to be impossible. Either the math just didn’t quite work out as I had envisioned, or what happened a lot: it looked like it was impossible to get the technology to do what I wanted. It probably never is impossible, it’s just damn hard. When I look at Google, I see an idea that did manage to make it into reality. I always wonder what their original idea was, it can’t have been “search the net”, it must have been something grander.
So there used to be weeks where I’d try and try to get those bloody computers do my bidding, but it just never turned out do to what I wanted. Those weeks were not wasted however. Because all the knowledge I acquired during that period helped me later on, do realize other ideas. Ideas that actually turned out to be feasible and implementable in a finite amount of time.
Last week was flashback week. I had a vision of creating an architectural playground on the net. A 3D environment that could be explored and experienced by any one, not just some one who took the time to install a 3D tool, to learn its interface and download/find 3D worlds. However I couldn’t get it to work like I wanted, so I’m not going to show you anything… For now.
It all started with this blogpost. It shows you more than a few ways to integrate 3D right on your homepage. I had a nice idea for a 3D world, so “why not?” I thought. And on top of that Google’s Lively had been in my “do something with it” queue for a while. So I started going down the list of suggestions in that post.
I’ll keep this short, but over a few evenings, I tried both Lively and 3DXplorer. Lively was exactly as the post described. Severely limited, both in performance and in what you can create. Currently there is no way to create your own objects. You’re stuck with a fairly limited selection of stock stuff. There’s some promise there, but it will have to mature a bit more.
So quickly I went to choice number 2, 3DXplorer. I was immediately charmed. It works as advertised and the virtual Benaroya concert hall is a great demonstration. But as I started modeling, I quickly became frustrated. The help is limited. For instance, the animation stuff has many links to the API documentation, which I couldn’t find anywhere. I also was unable to import the Collada 3D files created by the free version of SketchUp. I’m not sure what went wrong because it did show me the structure in the preview, but I could not load it into the actual environment. I will have to investigate further, in the meantime, really check out that Benaroya hall. It’s neat to have this right there in your browser. No need to install anything.