Web 3D is big business these days. You can tell, because Microsoft Corp president Steve Ballmer devoted the bulk of his SeyboldSF keynote Wednesday to Microsoft’s new Chromeffects internet graphics technology. We’ve had tremendous enthusiasm for Chromeffects from the hardware vendor community, Ballmer said. Little wonder: Chromeffects only runs on 350MHz Pentium machines with 64MB RAM, 100MHz bus, accelerated graphics cards and Windows 98. It’s what box shifters like to call a nice little ear ner. It’s almost as good as a new release of Quake. What Chromeffects has to offer the developer and user communities remains unclear. Sure, it lets you include 2D and 3D graphics and animation in web pages using only XML, which keeps network use down. Hence, also, the need for a fast graphics engine at the client end. The real trouble with Chromeffects is that it reimplements a lot of the functionality available in existing internet standards. It just does it in a proprietary and platform-specific way. That means developers who opt for Chromeff ects to jazz up their pages will be deliberately shutting Macintosh and Unix users out of their sites. It’s not as though the DirectX-based software promises to be especially good. In particular, word around the water cooler has it that Chromeffect’s 3D graphics engine is vastly inferior to VRML. Microsoft wouldn’t be trying to throw years of developer investment in an open 3D web standard down the drain now would it? We fired these questions and more to Microsoft’s multimedia maven, Eric Engstrom. As soon as he gets back to us we’ll let you know what he said. To be fair, the company actually supported VRML in Internet Explorer 4. A cross-platform standard, though, doesn’t give Windows any special advantage. Often, indeed, the reverse is the case. Anyway, who can afford to care about users and developers, when rich and powerful hardware vendors are breathing down your neck? If Chromeffects helps Intel et al shift more silicon, don’t hold your breath to see VRML triumph in the end. The last word, though, should go to Steve Ballmer, who as he wound up his keynote was realistic about the grassroots appeal of Chromeffects. I don’t think you’re going to be seeing a mad rush for it, he said.
