From my experience, Mozilla supports anyone who wants to move the web forward. They've been incredibly supportive of our team, and the open source engine that we're building at Verold. The ecosystem needs commercial vendors; what's important is that they're now running on the open web rather than a closed plugin.
What you see in the public gallery are the personal models that artists have put on display for their portfolio. In the background is a robust set of tools that let you review and collaborate in realtime. Every project is a multi-user space, meaning that if more than one person comes in, they can see each other, snap to another user's camera, and see material and scene changes as they are made.
We've got several schools piloting the platform - as a way for instructors to come into a scene with students and give them realtime feedback on WIP. Our first game studio clients are coming on board, doing daily reviews of outsourced work. And with the API that we're releasing in the coming months, we'll use the same tools to let web designers review and discuss assets being sourced from artists for the 3D websites, apps, and games being built on our engine.
I think this is what I'm getting hung up on, I assumed this meant that two or more people could be working simultaneously on the same project, rather than just looking at what one person is doing. I realize this is a brand new initiative and it is really impressive regardless, but I was wondering if that's a feature that will ever be available down the road?
When you upload a model, it gets dropped into a scene that can be viewed collaboratively by your team or your peers. Try visiting a project at the same time as someone else, and you'll see how that works. You can also click the Google+ button to launch into a video conference with your collaborative 3D space at the center.
On the editor: it's not a geometry editor, but what we do provide you with is the ability to create scenes/levels, and fine tune your materials. The power of the editor comes with the runtime that we'll be debuting at GDC this year. You can use our platform to host and manage your assets, create your levels, then pull those into your application and use Three.js to add dynamism to your applications. You'll see the first reference apps on that platform in the next couple of weeks, and a public release in March.
sorry about seeming flippant, I was actually in one of your betas and appreciate verold for what it's doing (and it's a fantastic service for a modeller) I would also love to have some way of doing ACTUAL web based 3d modeling. but the material editor is quite useful for setting up a displaycase for the model.
We've focused on professional artists, and support all the main formats that they use. The difference in load time is because a lot of what's in our public gallery is from ZBrush, 3D-Coat, or Mudbox - high res sculpts that were not meant for realtime. It's more testiment to our processing engine that we can make these run as well as we do. Not exactly apples to oranges comparing these sculpts to Sketchup models on Skethfab. We've written about the comparison to Sketchfab here:
http://verold.com/blog/2013/1/13/verold-studio-vs-sketchfab-...
It's not what we designed it for, but turns out that our material editor in http://studio.verold.com is a really nice way to see and learn about render settings. Even if you just run our intro tutorial to grab the Standford bunny, then turn the dials on its one material. See some of these principles in action, in Three.js.
Second the vote for Mixamo... awesome service, makes creating animation loops really fun and easy.
We're reworking the animation system in Three.js, so soon you'll be able to make your animations in Mixamo, and deliver them on the web. You can do it yourself with Three.js, or with our help using http://studio.verold.com (though, if you're going to do another Gangnam style, please use a better remix - like https://soundcloud.com/stirling-inch/pretty-gangnam-fly-stir...)
I tried to focus the post on some great examples of using native 3D on iOS, rather than the reasons why the tech hasn't picked up steam. But curious for insights. A large part of it is lack of pickup in iAds overall (our clients do their ad spend on Google and Facebook). We've built a tonne of augmented reality apps with 3D, that are situational and often not meant to become part of a users routine. These should be perfect to be done as ads, to save the user downloading the app. But then we're paying for every usage, on top of the app's development cost.
Other thoughts on why we haven't seen more great native 3D iAds? Other examples that should be added to the list?
It's only a matter of time, Microsoft and Apple won't have a choice but to adopt WebGL.
It's amazing what WebGL and Javascript can deliver, we've got models with hundreds of thousands of polys showing off really nicely on our site. If you like this car, check out the hundreds of models like it in Verold Studio - http://studio.verold.com
In Safari, you have to enable Developer mode and then turn on WebGL. In iOS, WebGL is only available in iAds. WebGL is certainly a threat to Apple's marketplace, but it's also an essential component of HTML5. Hence my prediction that they will have to come around.
