I knew that 3D was going to be huge when Zoo Magazine ran its fully 3D issue in June 2008.
Readers got a free pair of 3D specs with each issue and the 3D revolution was kicked off with "3D boobs babes Real Girl winners and a koala". Then James Cameron got in on the act with his own take on blue movies and the rest appears in the rear view mirror of history.
Now in true multi-vision form, I am believer that there are two 3Ds and both are sweeping through the way we produce media at the moment. The first requires glasses and is transforming video at the cinema. The second can be experienced without, and will transform online and mobile experiences.
The non-glasses 3D is the revolution that has already swept through television and video games, but stalled when it reached the internet. For example, sitting down to watch a sports match on TV when I was a kid, the list of players used to pop up on screen as a text list of the players. Nowadays, the players appear as video characters crossing their arms, placed in a 3D representation of the field in their positions and their images swoosh around like they are part of a Quiddich match.
Video games developers are masters in 3D interfaces as they have to create something that not only looks fantastic on-screen, but also works well as an interface. Even the set-up menus for consoles like Micsrosoft's Xbox are entertaining experiences in their own right, feeling more like a Minority Report scene than a technical set-up zone. This is less of a surprise when you think that both Xbox and Minority Report used the services of the same US interface agency.
Yet if I look at sports sites online and on mobile, the interface is strictly 2D with text as the dominant content, a photo or two if I'm lucky, and strictly informational. The entertainment value that the television and game cousins are so at home with seems flatly missing in the online experience.
This need not be the case. Technically, online and mobile platforms can support 3D games in browser and the near-ubiquitous Flash is more than able to support the creation of immersive 3D interfaces.
At The Project Factory, we are zealous fans of 3D. As an experiment, we have just beta launched a 3D version of Facebook. We felt that the there are new ways to look at the social networking site that had not yet been explored, so launched FriendCube last week. In the initial user feedback we found that people liked being able to see a more visual presentation of their friends, and see easily who has made the most recent updates.
Most interesting to me was the feedback that people feel FriendCube is a "warmer" place to hang out than Facebook. There is a sense that 3D creates something which is more of an emotional experience than the more information-focused 2D.
FriendCube will be the first in a series of three dimensional projects that we will launching for broadcasters, entertainment producers... and just for ourselves as experiments.
My panel at ad:tech Sydney this year is about "being brave" in digital media. I do not think that moving from 2D to 3D is being brave -- it is catching up. What is brave is launching projects that we believe in without them being associated with brands. It is a micro-publishing model that fits digital media as a distribution platform. Who knows, we might even publish a version that can be viewed by Zoo readers with 3D glasses as the next version.
Guy Gadney is director of The Project Factory.
