Siu Lun

I love people who innovate the web, I love people who tries new things, but there are certain things, even though you try, just doesn’t make sense on the medium that you’re building on.

Over the past year, agencies around the world have been creating websites that uses 3rd-party plugins (that are not mass adopted) in campaign websites which they want push the boundaries of the interactivity possibilities.

Two of the most prominent plugins are D’Fusion (Transformers website), and an up-and-coming Unity web player (Unity is what a lot of iPhone 3D app developers use btw. Used on: http://www.honeydefender.com/).

I personally believe these two plugins and the commercial websites that are being built are more of an experimentational nature by the tech lead in the agencies than of actual benefit to the brand to which they’re building for.

Any agencies would be able to tell you from the years of experience they have now of constructive Flash based interactive websites that barriers of entries is a killer for many of their websites. Clients (brands) will ever only want the reach offered by the web, otherwise, why bother investing in websites?

These 3rd-party plugins in Unity and D’Fusion are barriers of entry. They’re so much of a barrier that normal web users will not bother to install. Granted, once installed, the experience and possibilities is over what Flash can offer normally, however, they still suffer the same downfalls Flash has with heavy interactive websites.

Namely.

Speed of loading
High minimum specification of machine
Bandwidth requirement

Given the barrier of entry, and the level of interactivity achieved vs the investment made into those websites, it really begs the question, why did they not just build a OpenGL application? This is further enhanced by the fact that most of these ‘interactive’ websites do not even take advantage of the fact they’re on the net and they can communicate in real-time with data – though one can argue that you can do the same in an OpenGL application.

I’m beginning to question the relevance of online deployment that are not made to be indexed and discovered.

I wonder what the client truly think of the websites built using those plugins, the question is: was it worth it?