JD on EP

Wow! Sam really drank the kool-aid.

I want to produce highly interactive 3D web content right NOW.

You say:
"If 3D was actually the sine qua non of successful technologies, then Shockwave is
the most practical way to do it today."

How can You give reasons for this statement ?

I am actually considering the following four players as possible target players for highly
interactive 3D web content:
1) The ubiquitous Flash Player
2) The less ubiquitous Shockwave Player
3) The more exotic Viewpoint Player (http://www.viewpoint.com)
4) The even more exotic Axel Player with the modeling-to-interaction authoring tool
AxelEdge (http://www.mindavenue.com; have been bought by 2020technologies (http://www.2020technologies.com/main.html)

If one looks at the future web 3D efforts of MS, it does make sense to look at the
situation in this field today. Any suggestions/recommendations for web 3D right now ?

I think the "Flash Killer" talk is just silly. Sparkle is more like Anark Studio 3.5 (Anark.com) than any other application on the market.

Sparkle is part Anark Studio, part Director and then some.

I use Anark, I use Director. Sparkle looks really cool to me because I am already very comfy in Anark. They basically took the entire feature set of Anark Studio and ripped it off. In fact when I saw the features overview page I kept thinking they just cut and pasted the info from Anark's brochure and pasted them in for Sparkle. LOL!

Kai, are you asking me why Macromedia Shockwave is the most practical way to do realtime 3D on the web today?

If so, then it's because most consumers can just view the file instantly... they don't have to install anything new. That's why most clients find it practical.

I saw numbers once that Shockwave 3D had more viewership than all other 3D engines put together, but I can't document that claim for you today, particularly in light of the new Adobe Reader's features. (fwiw, the Macromedia consumer audit measures how many have Viewpoint's initial stub viewer, not how many have its 3D capabilities.)

That "Flash 3D" line is interesting, particularly with the bitmap-skewing and lighting effects in the new Player, but you'd still be writing both rendering engine and scene description, rather than just working on the scene description and usingthe native-code, hardware-accelerated general realtime 3D rendering engine... different things entirely, in many ways.

I read Sam's point a little differently. I read that you get an amazing variety of extremely well executed features all in one bundle. It was the whole list - not just that you can do 3D. And also that you can do it in one authoring environment. Imagine mixing dynamically laid out components and 3D using Flash and Director and then do some real-time lossless screen capture and you get a bit of what MS is saying they will make easy.

Sam wrote:

"If you were a software developer trying to do these things, would you want to evaluate different runtimes to see which one answers your needs in the most appropriate way?"

and earlier Bill Gates said in his interview with Jon Udell:

"what the Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere thing does... "

"It overlaps what Flash does a lot..."

"The Mac is one of the targets that we explicitly talked about, so yes. Now it's not 100 percent of XAML, we need to be clear on that. But the portion of XAML we've picked here will be everywhere. Absolutely everywhere..."

So I don't think its just "Flash 3D" Sam was talking about.

From my perspective one question will be what features/security does Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere give you.

The next few years will be interesting times...

I think many people should be careful assuming capabilities of sparkle. The product is targeted at building user interfaces for avalon apps. Being able to produce game logic and having quality 3d data handling in the ide is not something i've seen promoted. This seems more like a combo of interface designer and some of xcode's abilities.