The rise of the 3-D Web?

The future of the Web is 3-D, not video, according to former “Network Worlder” Ian Lamont, who now oversees editorial content for our sister site, The Industry Standard. Lamont’s blog entry, based on an earlier graduate course paper, was sparked by YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley’s recent post about his company’s long-term strategy. Hurley argues that video will dominate the Web. Lamont argues, effectively, that it will not. Instead, an emerging cluster of graphics technologies will enable a highly interactive 3-D Web, which will affect content creation and “consumption” in new ways. He says that video is essentially unchanged after more than half-a-century as a static and linear [the two Great Evils for new media boosters) technology, with its roots in an even older and static and linear technology — film. That’s certainly true of YouTube, which is essentially a library of film clips, an historical record, though it can be pretty recent history, just hours old. I think he’s right, though I disagree with a number of details. Video, with TV broadcasting, created something that is still powerful and a fundemental part of today’s Internet character: the immediate witness to an unfolding story. “Live from New York” or Washington or, today, your own neighborhood, or a fishing village on the Chilean coast. Radio creates that in words; video, and especially live video, adds images. Evidence for Lamont’s insights, and against Hurley’s hope, is in the work of film director James Cameron, whose Lightstorm Entertainment is creating what Cameron persuasively argues is the future of “Hollywood” — 3-D immersive experiences on a scale that even the most sophisticated home entertainment technology is unlikely to match. No longer “movies” these creations could be called “arties” — artificial realities. The inherent paradox of the term is part of the technology’s appeal. But Lamont doesn’t address a parallel trend: users who are mobile, equipped with mobile devices that have more or less continuous, wireless Internet access. Part of the Apple’s iPod success is that it’s a paradox machine: a vast library of personally selected music into a device that proclaims its coolness by getting smaller. 3-D immersive graphics as pure image require some optimal screen size that makes interactvity feasible and functional. Interestingly, director James Cameron was a featured speaker at the Microsoft Advance ’08 conference last May, where the theme was “Connected Entertainment” — mobile, music, TV/video, and gaming. Cameron is using a digital asset management system created by Microsoft to track ever digital element, down to a blade of grass, that will be seen in his upcoming 3-D projection film, Avatar, due out in December 2009. But 3-D graphics as a way of organizing and participating in data, “content,” and social relationships via mobile devices and networks has hardly even begun. I’m not a gamer, but my impression is that most games today are still seen and played as entertainment. What’s not yet been explored is the idea of the game as an interactive interface to the world, or at least my world. As an example of the future, Lamont invites us to consider a Web-based soap opera (other than the current presidential election campaign) where “viewers” can change the avatars of the characters, their appearance, their location. But that kind of interactivity is ultimately an imaginative dead-end because it’s ultimately self-centered, enabling someone to recreate the world entirely according to his own desires, and it’s odd that Lamont doesn’t mention what will be the obvious and profitable application: 3-D porn. By contrast, what I’m calling artificial reality at its best is a projection of my reality, my self, into a virtual world of other such projections, wherever I am, whenever I am.