"OTHER WEB3D HAPPENINGS"
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Well the Web3D|VRML 2000 conference was smaller than usual. There were approximately 260ish attendees. This was down from the usual middle 400ish attendees. It's hard to say exactly why but my guess is the lack of good promotion and the industry being in a wide flux with no clear corporate leader. This is not to say that Web3D is passe. Au contraire! Web3D really does seem ready to take of (yes we've all heard that one before). There are more proprietary and non-proprietary solutions available to content builders then every before.
The highlight of the conference was, as usual, the Web3D Roundup (Official page also). This wham-bam-thank-you-maam event organized by Timothy Childs, Don Brutzman and the rest of the NPS (Navy Post Graduate) crew is always highly entertaining. Presenters with anywhere from 1 to 5 minutes get to strut there demo-ware.
The unquestioned winner of best presentation was Aaron Walsh who was going to show the progress and results of the UMEL (Universal MEdia Library).
Given that 4 minutes was not enough he instead sat on a chair with burning candles on his lap chanting, and demoed screen shots for the last 30 seconds. It was
hilarious!
The winners of the Golden Lasso Awards (the Web3D Roundup awards) were: Art: Alternate Fabric, Ecommerce: Cybelius, Education: MBARI, Entertainment: Groove Alliance, Technology: Lattice Technology, Performance: Aaron Walsh "The Meditation Guide"
Some of my personal favorites were Shout Interactive's demo of their new enhancements to shout3d (the no-plug-in necessary solution) which include: streaming, environment maps, NURBS, and integration with
Spazz3D authoring. This means that for $100, you can buy Spazz3D and deliver content to your non-commercial web site. For a few hundred dollars you can deliver the content to the
commercial site.
The folks at Lunatic Interactive demoed their "Starlight Express" theatrical seating app functioning with blaxxun3d their no-plug-in Java app.
And the folks from Technicon demoed a tremendously polished and highly user friendly major application for office furniture layout and sales. The great thing about this application is the way they
customized the navigation and interaction controls to be specific for their application.
The art show was also well attended and placed at the back of the exhibitors space.
While not the biggest or most dynamic of the Web3D conferences the best part was getting together with old friends and colleagues. A good time
was had by all!
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