Vivaty defects to Flash for Vivaty Scenes Lite

tola — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:25:00 +0100

This is a very sad day for open standards on the 3D web.

I'm devastated to hear that the X3D poster child that is Vivaty has stooped to shoe-horning a feature-limited version of its service into a proprietary 2D graphics plugin as a misguided attempt at achieving cross-platform support.

Yes, I'm a Mac (and Linux) user who would like to be able to use Vivaty, no I don't want to use a stripped down version hacked into Flash.

I wonder what great things could have been achieved if the engineering effort put into hacking together a 3D application in a 2D graphics engine had instead been ploughed into supporting and improving Unix/Linux-based implementations of X3D, the ISO standard for 3D graphics on the web. The Web3D community would benefit considerably from Vivaty's contribution to standardising and promoting the innovations they have made with the Vivaty Player, AJAX3D being one example.

I'm not angry at Vivaty's misguided efforts which were no doubt driven by business decisions, I am instead disappointed that they felt that the open standards route was not a viable cross-platform option for a company which has previously championed the standards movement.

tola - web3d

Vivaty defects to Flash for Vivaty Scenes Lite