Nokia, IBM, Intel and Microsoft support open source projects that form the future 3D Web. The two most notable projects are realXtend and Opensimulator. These open source projects are healthy and self-governed. The big companies speed up the development by contributing money and resources.
Nokia, IBM, Intel and Microsoft support open source
projects that form the future 3D Web. The two most notable projects
are realXtend and Opensimulator. These open source projects are
healthy and self-governed. The big companies speed up the
development by contributing money and resources.
First prototype of the 3D web is already run at thousands of
Opensim servers all around the globe. The 3D Web bears similarities
to 2D Web; Users can follow links to teleport from a 3D
world to another one. 3D Viewers are used to browse the 3D content
on the servers.
The 3D web software consists of
Opensimulator server, comparable to Apache, and a 3D browser,
comparable to Firefox. Today there are already many 3D browsers to
choose from, the most advanced one called
realXtend viewer.
The Opensimulator movement started early 2007 when Darren Guard
published his C# reverse engineered Second Life compatible server.
The Opensimulator (Opensim) project was born (read some history
here).
Later many companies, most notably IBM and
Intel (check
Intel's ScienceSim effort and their
latest work with Opensim) have joined the Opensim project.
Microsoft started to support Opensim
indirectly via its C# user community. Even though there are big
companies involved, the project backbone is built on hundreds of
volunteer contributors.
Nokia joined the band by backing up the
realXtend project. The realXtend project is mostly focusing on
the 3D Viewer and user experience; It developed an enhanced 3D
Viewer for Opensim based on Second Life viewer. Now the realXtend
project is building a from-scratch 3D
Viewer for the Opensim platform and Modrex module to support viewer enhancements at
the server.
3D worlds have already, even in the current prototype form,
spawned many business cases: IBM has demonstrated
data-centre managing application and
Virtual meetings with integrated Sametime product. Architects
are using 3D web to show house plans to
customers. Green Phosphor is visualizing data
for medicine industry.
Immersive Education initiative, collaboration of hundreds of
universities, is evaluating and using virtual worlds for
education.
Open source seems like the only way to implement the new 3D Web.
No company or government wants to tie their applications to a
single commercial closed source software provider. The big
companies know this and they can not afford to ignore open source
movement.
By the end of 2009 3D Web is developed into a stable and usable
form that most probably allows mass adoption.