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My point isn't so much text vs binary. It's text==1D vs much of VR content which is multi-dimensional. And the more multi-dimensional, the more the most human

My point isn't so much text vs binary. It's text==1D vs much of VR content which is multi-dimensional. And the more multi-dimensional, the more the most human readable format becomes the non-text version (text -> trees -> images -> models/videos/animations). Honestly even html suffers from the translation between linear-text and the tree-like DOM. Many of the pain points of webdev are dealing with this boundary. Go even farther to scenarios where you'd want to interact with the 2D rep of a webpage and you're completely off the reservation. Imagine using javascript/dom to ask the question "what letter is below the 17th character of this this paragraph", the question almost comes across as absurd! "What about different fonts? What about phones? What if there's an image below, is that 'null' or should I skip to the text?" The question is meaningless! Then again, text selection is exactly this question... On the web we've found some very reasonable boundaries between webpage responsibilities, browser responsibilities, and accepted a large swath of functionality as impossible. In VR those boundaries are still in flux. VR scenes are a combination of all sorts of content, of all sorts of dimensionality, often including temporal components as well. Certainly for storage and transmission 'linear' is the only option, but what is the best working representation? Is it a tree with rich nodes? Well maybe, but that's going to make it that much harder for those nodes to interact. On the other extreme is it a 4d array of temporal-voxels? Probably not until we have petabyte DSL. Imo this is why this is a hard problem, why VRML has never really caught on, why after 25 years of making 3d games/movies there's still no standard scene description, why Facebook is taking a stab at this with this project, and why VR is a pretty exciting place to work :)

meheleventyone 10y ago
Scene representations in game engines tend to follow the use case so there tend to be several generated from the same scene description. Generally because one representation that is useful for organising a scene isn't great for spatial queries. Likewise we need a representation that can be fed efficiently to graphics hardware. Or the use of voxels for simulation. My rambling description aside my point is that there isn't likely to be one working representation. For WebVR hopefully we can steer a good path between that which should be represented in an HTML/DOM context and that which should be represented elsewhere. For example glTF looks quite promising both as a runtime format for models and for scenes.

meheleventyone 10y ago

Scene representations in game engines tend to follow the use case so there tend to be several generated from the same scene description. Generally because one representation that is useful for organising a scene isn't great for spatial queries. Likewise we need a representation that can be fed efficiently to graphics hardware. Or the use of voxels for simulation. My rambling description aside my point is that there isn't likely to be one working representation. For WebVR hopefully we can steer a good path between that which should be represented in an HTML/DOM context and that which should be represented elsewhere. For example glTF looks quite promising both as a runtime format for models and for scenes.