Web Development In 3D
Three.js Logo Via Medium
As technology evolved, the world was able to gradually transform the digital world in our flat screens with something that truly seems like magic—3D computer graphics. Nowadays, 3D has become the standard in animation movies, mainstream video games, and digital design. However, a large part of our digital experience has retained its 2D form even with all these developments: websites. According to Forbes, there are currently about 200 million active websites on the internet, and only about 100,000 of those have been recorded to be using the top most popular 3D code libraries on the technical statistics tracker BuiltWith Trends. Why haven’t web developers adopted 3D technology, and will we ever get to fully experience the internet in 3D?
Not surprisingly, we have had the software capability to create 3D graphics in websites as far back as the 2000s, and we essentially had all of our modern tools by 2011. The software used for 3D graphics in browsers, Web Graphics Library (WebGL), was adopted by most browsers by 2011 according to developer company’s records and the modern code libraries such as Three.js that facilitate 3D web development had also been released at this time. So, then, why do we still have this lack of 3D websites 13 years after all the necessary software was implemented?
The main bottleneck in the spread of 3D websites was hardware. Showing 3D graphics, although seeming like magic, is really just math—a lot of math. And while most web developers’ computers in 2011 could have dealt with the processing load, they had to consider the presentation of the websites from the websites’ clients’ perspectives. Webpages are not delivered fully rendered; rather, a client’s computer only receives the code that instructs the browser how to render the webpages, and it is the task of the client’s computer to do all the processing. It was of course not the case that everyone’s computers could handle such processes as quickly as typically demanded when using a web page, so 3D websites were deemed impractical for most purposes.
However, hardware limitations applied to fields all across the board—not just web development—so why were only websites impeded by these limitations while other fields progressed with 3D graphics? The other major disadvantage for websites here was that they are expected to be instant. Animations and designs are free to take hours or days to render the final product, and video games are also given the leisure of loading screens. For example, this is a scene from Pixar’s 2021 movie Luca, which Pixar claims to have taken 50 hours to render per frame in their exhibition. But could you imagine expecting to wait even just a whole minute for a website to load (with good internet)? Ultimately, our stringent standards for fast webpage loading times completely quashed the development of 3D websites.
Furthermore, 3D is simply harder than 2D. It is easy to get started with creating 2D websites with modern tools; in fact, it is often the way most people are first introduced to programming. Creating 3D websites, on the other hand, requires quite a bit more depth of technical knowledge and additional skills like 3D modeling.
Despite all these barriers, it finally seems that 3D web development is gaining popularity. Lily Smith, the Senior Editor of Shaping Design, lists some 3D design showcases made by companies like Gucci and FromScout in her article while stating that “the 3D Design treatment is continuing to grow in popularity, popping up across the web as yet another way to engage users who are spending a good portion of their waking hours online…”. A large collection of 3D websites is also found on the website of Awwwards, a professional web design and development competition company (I personally found Bruno Simon’s portfolio website to be particularly inspiring).
Although it may be a while before the majority of websites are 3D, it is an exciting prospect that we will one day be reading articles such as this in a digital world that seems even more magical than now. Perhaps, then people won’t complain as much about my writing needing “more depth.”