3D technology is being hailed by experts as one of the possible answers to the credit crunch, as web designers look for that extra wow factor to give their sites the edge in the economic downturn

Having already been the victim of one false dawn eight years ago, 3D technology is beginning to emerge from the shadows as one of the most exciting developments on the internet.

‘The trend is very clear,’ says Karthik Ramani, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Indiana’s Purdue University and an authority on 3D technology.

‘The real world is 3D and, as humans, we want things to behave in the way that they do in the real world, so going to 3D is very natural. It is the next evolution of the web.’

Techno race
The claims have not gone unnoticed by internet companies like Google and Microsoft, which have developed Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth in what appears to be a race to capture the world in 3D on the web. These developments are now exciting traditional industries such as property sales and furniture design, and are spawning a whole new virtual world industry, far removed from current technologies like Second Life.

‘The rate of development of these technologies is already having an impact on the US real estate market,’ says Doug Garcia, the director of research for Colliers Parrish, a large real estate group based in the San Francisco area.

‘We’ve explored using 3D modeling on the market and are working towards a future where actual 3D tours will allow you to go to different floors of a building and look around the location using Google Earth.

‘Increasingly we think that people will want to use 3D to assess the value of a property remotely, and the challenge there will be in the refresh of the 3D worlds that will evolve, though I could see that happening with social networking for an area where people will work to contribute information.’

Superior interiors
And while companies like Google focus on the outside, other companies are now working hard to create interiors that show off properties and products. Here at United Lane, we want to form a closer association between 3D virtual environments and the real world.

‘Our aim is to make 3D technology available to anyone using the web,’ says Chief Technology Officer, Kresten Thomsen. ‘So, what we do is let people upload plans of their own houses from a 2D floor plan and populate it with real furniture and objects, change floors and wall colors and then render the whole thing in a photorealistic fashion, because people find that more compelling and attractive.

‘In our visualizations, we can even add the view from a window; that is how I see the internet going – it will be a believable mirror of the real world.’

Virtual world
While United Lane can make photorealistic images of buildings that do not yet exist in a remarkably short space of time, Vzillion, wants to go further. In line with the old vision of the internet bubble at the turn of the century, when developers promised a photorealistic world inhabited by lifelike avatars of real people, Vzillion envisages 3D with everything.

‘We think in 3D and we feel things in 3D. If you look at a virtual world you see an environment you are engaged with,’ says Antonio Collier, the company’s CEO.

Its offering for the future is a 3D virtual world where you are given the keys to a virtual flat that can be populated with the objects that you use in your everyday life. Objects which, according to Collier, will work in much the same way that they would if they were in your real room.
‘You will be able to go to Amazon and point and click and play a music movie on the TV in your virtual apartment,’ he says. Potentially, it’s a move to mesh the real world with Second Life – that might have implications for both.

3D thinking
Professor Ramani, whose resume also includes work at the prestigious Stanford Research Institute in California, says that the key factor in the use of virtual environments for people is the amount of data that a 3D world can convey.

‘I have worked with cognitive psychologists and we have looked at the way that people like to navigate 3D content. We gave them the ability to take snapshots from within the visualization and found that people always choose positions that allow them to convey the maximum amount of visual content.

‘Of course, there has to be some value for the 3D visualization to be useful, and we found that people considered the 3D interface much more intuitive than a 2D one.’

Part of the reason for this, according to a recent study carried out by scientists, is because our brains find 3D environments more reassuring. Their research suggests that the part of the brain governing vision is able to map out a copy of a 3D image by projecting it onto responsive neurons that can create a 3D model of an object.

‘Human beings are keenly aware of object structure, and that may be due to this clear structural representation in the brain,’ Charles E. Connor, associate professor in the Zanvyl Krieger Mind-Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, told Science Daily in October of this year.

In the study, Connor and colleague Yukako Yamane, a postdoctoral fellow, trained two monkeys to watch a computer screen while 3D objects were played upon it, while the researchers recorded the responses of neurons in the higher-level part of the visual area.

According to Connor, the research may ultimately reveal the reasons why our brains find some objects and views visually pleasing, yet dismiss others. The suggestion is that there may be an element of ‘pleasing comfort’ created in the brain among groups of neurons when they display an object.