[x3d-public] Why Google Glass Broke - NYTimes.com

[Joshua Smith]

Nicely said, Len.

My company is clearly a market winner in our niche (using 3D for product marketing). In the last week of January, 541 different 3D models that we have created were viewed on the web or in our mobile apps. Dozens of other companies have competed against us over the years, and all have failed.

Partly it’s a business model problem. The business model we use (creating both the viewing technology AND the 3D models) is one that Wall Street hates. You are supposed to be a viewer company (Adobe) OR a content company (Digitas). You can’t be both — that’s not something investors understand. Yet that’s exactly how my company has prospered. By being both.

This is not unprecedented, though. Look at Pixar: They made both the art (toy story) and the technology (renderman).

Look at the first successful 3D game companies: The early games had the art and technology so wrapped up together they called the engine by the name of the game! (“The Quake Engine”)

The kinds of things that everyone here is building don’t seems to lend themselves to the model of separating art from technology. It happens on the fringes: engines like Unity appear from time to time. They allow the artist to just be artists, and the technologists to just be technologists — for a while. But in the long term, they always become irrelevant. The engine companies (or engine products, like Flash 3D Stage) always fail eventually. Why is that?

One of the reasons my company has survived is because we aren’t afraid to pivot technologies. We started with a plugin. When those became untenable, we pivoted to Java. When that became untenable, we pivoted to a mix of native (on mobile) and WebGL. We adopted 3D PDF for a while, when it looked like a rising star, and dumped it when Adobe fumbled the ball.

We’ve kept our 3D models in a format that isn’t tied to one specific rendering engine. That’s part of what allowed us to pivot. We just keep making new “compilers” that convert from our meta-format into the runtime representation we need for the new viewer.

From that standpoint, what we are doing internally is probably more like Collada than it is like X3D/VRML. But since we make the art, and the compilers, and the viewers, we have nothing to gain by trying to fit into a standard instead of just rolling our own formats. And since we’re not selling our viewing technology, we have nothing to gain by trying to make our approach a standard.

(Of course we exploit standard formats to get the data out of the modeling tools. But that’s just for expedience. We immediately convert to our own meta-format and never look back.)

I’ve never found a business model for X3D/VRML that actually made sense to me. I think it’s probably survived because it’s been funded by people who didn’t need a business model. Academics. Government. Hobbyist.

-Joshua

> On Feb 18, 2015, at 10:35 AM, cbullard at hiwaay.net wrote:
> 
> It's a fascinating market from a historical perspective.  Some small groups
> succeed by staying on the edge of the standard but essentially building
> proprietary mostly non interoperable model libraries.  A handful of mostly
> proprietary engines consume mostly interoperable model libraries but render
> them in almost faithful but not quite faithful scenes.   The artists are
> left to ride the churn or lose the investment in building the art.  Meanwhile
> a new generation of hardware vendors create wholly non-interoperable systems
> of content and iron.
> 
> Worlds without end and not enough profit to create and end to end marketplace, amen.  Very successful corporations invest substantial resources and yet again
> and again are starved like Hannibal's armies and forced to sail back to Carthage without the prize.   A standard said dead by market prophet after prophet is the only one still standing from the early years.  VRML/X3D won't die.
> 
> A market analyst should puzzle over this.  A university graduate student should
> write a paper to answer the question:  why does this market never congeal?  There are survivors but no market winners.  Why?
> 
> len
> 
>> Quoting Mitchell Williams <mitchellwi at google.com>:
> 
>> Interesting article.
>> 
>> I just attended the Silicon Valley Android Developers Meetup and they had a
>> presentation on Google Glass to help children with autism.  Ned Sahin,
>> neuroscientist
>> from Harvard (http://www.nedsahin.com/) discussed how they were using
>> Glass, and that it's not exactly dead, just version 0.1  His project is at
>> http://brain-power.com/
>> 
>> As we know from Web 3D, technology evolves with many good concepts dead on
>> the roadside, and others following in those trails blazed by those before
>> it.
>> 
>> Mitch
>> 
>> On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 1:21 PM, Don Brutzman <brutzman at nps.edu> wrote:
>> 
>>> [Original headline: "Broken Glass"]
>>> 
>>> Style:  Why Google Glass Broke
>>> 
>>> by Nick Bilton, New York Times, FEB. 4, 2015
>>> 
>>> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/05/style/why-google-glass-broke.html
>>> 
>>> This is a story that involves lots of public intrigue, a futuristic
>>>> wearable technology, a secret laboratory, fashion models, sky divers and an
>>>> interoffice love triangle that ended a billionaire?s marriage. This is the
>>>> story of Google Glass.
>>>> 
>>>> Before we begin, this is the part in the tale where I should probably
>>>> explain what Google Glass is. Except, I don?t have to. Google Glass didn?t
>>>> just trickle out into the world. Instead, it exploded with the kind of fuss
>>>> and pageantry usually reserved for an Apple iSomething.
>>>> 
>>> [...]
>>> 
>>> all the best, Don
>>> --
>>> Don Brutzman  Naval Postgraduate School, Code USW/Br
>>> brutzman at nps.edu
>>> Watkins 270,  MOVES Institute, Monterey CA 93943-5000 USA
>>> +1.831.656.2149
>>> X3D graphics, virtual worlds, navy robotics http://faculty.nps.edu/
>>> brutzman
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> x3d-public mailing list
>>> x3d-public at web3d.org
>>> http://web3d.org/mailman/listinfo/x3d-public_web3d.org
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Mitch Williams
>> 
>> Check out my book "*WebGL Hotshot*" available at:
>> https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/webgl-hotshot
>> 
>> 310-809-4836 (outside line)
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> x3d-public mailing list
> x3d-public at web3d.org
> http://web3d.org/mailman/listinfo/x3d-public_web3d.org