The Web 3D Zeitgeist

In August 2004 I was wondering about the relative popularity of various Web3D formats. No hard data was available. So I turned as one does in such a situation, to Google. At the time the dominant formats were the venerable VRML, its successor X3D, Adobe Atmosphere and Macromedia's Shockwave 3D.

I formulated queries that turned up, as near as I could tell, only pages about the various formats, and counted the hits. You can see the search strings I used by hovering over the format names in the charts below. I expect that the differences in name usage will impact on the number of hits a format gets. Still, some data is better than none, and it will be interesting to see the trends over time.

27 August 2004

With my first foray, I was surprised to find that VRML, which has been pronounced dead more times than Apple, was not just more cited than any other format - it was still far ahead. Clearly the other formats have a long way to go to match its impact.

The second surprise was that X3D, the emerging replacement format, was already in the number 2 slot, nearly three times more frequently cited than Shockwave 3D, a format with a great authoring tool (Director) behind it.

24 September 2004

A month later I ran the queries again.
VRML was still getting roughly the same number of hits.

X3D had added another 12,000 hits in a month; Shockwave 3D had gained half that, and Adobe Atmosphere had fallen slightly.

24 September 2005

I didn't think about this for a while - but here we are a year later, and I thought to run it again. The first surprise comes before I even run the numbers; both Shockwave 3D and Adobe Atmosphere have been abandoned by their vendors. I should have expected this, but I didn't. I've seen dozens of proprietary Web3D formats emerge and vanish; I was utterly unsurprised for example when Microsoft Chrome, launched in a dazzle of publicity, never saw release. These looked different. Macromedia and Adobe had solid business models selling authoring software, and track records of successful software.

Still, they're gone. Or are they? To look at the hits, you'd doubt it.

The second surpise is VRML. I'd thought the old horse would stay static at a million hits. Instead, it's up over four million. X3D has grown over 5 times, closing in on a million, which a year ago would have put it within a nose of overtaking its ancestor. Shockwave 3D and Adobe Atmosphere are refusing to die, growing by 4 or 5 times in the year.

And Shockwave 3D has been reincarnated as U3D; or at least it shares the underlying technology, developed by Intel. U3D is the new kid on the block, being shepherded by Intel through ECMA standardisation after being rejected by the Web3D Consortium. Right now it's barely a blip, but we'll see where the year takes us.