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Cult3D objects tend to have very high quality rendered surfaces and the feedback from the keyboard or mouse is very responsive. A well developed product, Cycore has created numerous support tools including a 3D Studio Max 3.0 exporter. The business model for Cycore is that the software download for Cult3D Designer 5 is free, but there are usage license fees ranging from $360 to $3600 or more. The download plug-in ranges from 700KB to 982KB.

Nieman-Marcus is launching a 3D-enabled store this fall, powered by WebGlide, where shoppers can view women's shoes from all dimensions in a virtual boutique.

WebGlide provides a mixture of 3D and video (similar to Apple's QuickTime VR), combining "showrooms" rendered in 3D with video feeds of products, combined with a shopping system. RealNetworks invested heavily in the company and is distributing the RichFX Player to its more than 115 million RealSystem G2 users starting in May. Using proprietary "RichFX" technology, WebGlide compresses scalable video to as little as 1 percent the size of a comparable MPEG file, while retaining pan/zoom features.

MetaStream is promoting a new 3.0 version of its streaming 3D Web technology that is intended for E-commerce, but few practical examples exist. Potential customers have likely been waiting to see what happens while the company recovers from the ashes of financial woes experienced by its parent, MetaCreations.

The savior of the MetaStream technology will likely come from a surprising source. Adobe has purchased MetaCreations' orphaned product Canoma, and plans to include support for MetaStream 3.0 into all Adobe products including Photoshop, LiveMotion, Premiere, and After Effects. Continuing to play catch up on the Web, Adobe has wisely chosen to align itself with a viable technology instead of starting from scratch with yet another competitive product. MetaStream already has alliances with Microsoft and RealNetworks, so with a push from Adobe, this technology could become a contender in the coming year. Since MetaStream's financial future looks a bit bleak as of this writing, it's not impossible to imagine the technology being morphed into an all-new Adobe offering under a different name, perhaps including scalable vector graphic (SVG) and PDF support.

Insert Virtual Coin
Online 3D gaming has long been a desirable "killer application" for VRML proponents, but has suffered from the lack of support from gaming companies. Their attitude has been, "Why spend the time building a huge 3D gaming system for the Web, when you could have your young cyberpunk programmers building something for the way-more-profitable Sony Playstation?"

Various flavors of VRML games exist (if you look hard enough), such as InWorldVR.com's Mars2200 shoot-em-up game. Unfortunately, with an average 56K modem, the game takes three minutes to load the application and first screen, then another 40 seconds before you can do anything. Game play is adequate, but certainly wouldn't convince me to embrace Larry Ellison's manifesto of remotely served applications.

An exciting new option for Web 3D gaming from Flatland eschews VRML for its own HTML-like language. The technology called "3DML" creates, or "describes" Internet-ready three-dimensional SPOTs.

Flatland's 3DML has many advantages, including the fact that much of the syntax for 3DML will be familiar to those who already know basic HTML. And more importantly, 3DML is unique because it allows you to build a 3D space on the Web without doing any 3D modeling.

Building a 3DML space for the Web is actually very similar to building in the real world using familiar pieces such as simple wooden blocks or even two-by-fours from the local lumberyard. In 3DML, there is a set of blocks, which you can put together to build a house, or a waterfall, or anything you desire. In the basic 3DML block set, there are blocks with the shapes of ramps, columns, signs, and more. The village 3DML block set has blocks shaped like trees, houses, and sidewalks. Each of these blocks is represented by a character on your keyboard.

What makes this solution so enticing for gaming is that it has been developed to build "Spots" (miniature VR worlds) that can be used for numerous purposes. Flatland has built-in hot Spots, collision detection, and you can incorporate video in your Spot. Flatland Spots are delivered using the Flatland Rover browser plug-in, and the company will even host your 3D Spot for free on their community site. One example of this, "Temple of Fate," which creates a Tomb Raider-style world, has even been included on the TombRaider4 CD.

3DML is simple to use, and the Rover plug-in allows you to view the code for learning purposes. The Rover client has easy intuitive controls, with options for lighting, pixel block size, and remembering your locations. I was impressed at 3DML's utility over a slow connection, and once loaded it played very well.

What's Your Vector
The most popular technology on the Web is arguably Macromedia's Flash and Shockwave (the distinction between the two depends on whether the files are authored in Flash, or in Director/ Authorware). While not really a 3D format, clever animators have painstakingly exported 3D animation to vector frames to create some stunning examples of 3D that load up to 100 times faster than a VRML environment. The 3D Virtual Pool game found on Macromedia's Shockwave.com site, although not a VRML application, shows off this technique in startling detail and capability.

To simplify the potential of this approach, a new company called Electric Rain has released a truly revolutionary product called Swift 3D that allows you to create simple animations with 3D primitives, materials/textures, and lighting, as well as text. Swift 3D imports 3DS models, and Adobe Illustrator and EPS vector files. What makes this such a cool application, however, is that it exports its files as vector-based Flash format files. You can even edit the resulting files in Flash to add static backgrounds, MP3, interactivity, or whatever. Presumably, support will follow for the developing SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) standard. This technology can be used for building games, Web sites, or anything that you've seen done with ultra-compact Flash files, but now it can be in 3D.