I work with computers all day long. And they're terrible. Awful. And marvelous and wonderful and the best thing ever...
3D graphics is used for three things right now: Games. CAD. And making pretty pictures for TVs and movies.
3D graphics on PCs is really, really awful right now. The boards and drivers are hard to install and are very buggy, and are changing so fast it is impossible for developers to figure out what they should target.
Unless you have a high tolerance for pain, wait a couple of years for the dust to settle before making a big investment in 3D.
I'm torn between hating Microsoft and just not caring.
Since I don't want to live in Washington (been there, done that...) I can't work with them. And if you ask Microsoft they'll be very clear in telling you that, if you're doing anything important, you have two choices:
Compete and go out of business-- because Microsoft will duplicate any software technology if it is important enough.
The only other alternative is to do something that isn't important to Microsoft right now, and hope you don't get stepped on when they finally do get serious about taking over your niche.
But I actually think that all this will change. There's a huge amount of anti-Microsoft sentiment among programmers and the technical elite, and Microsoft has too big an ego to realize that eventually this "thumb-your-nose" faction will cause them real harm.
For example, there will be many more security holes in Microsoft operating systems and products than in systems and products with widely available source code. The reason is simple-- more people looking at and hacking a piece of code means fewer bugs and fewer security loopholes. And Microsoft can't afford to hire enough talented, motivated people to keep up with the huge community of programmers that now exists on the Net.
Their narrow view of the world is hurting them, too. Wedging Windows onto a palm-top PC is an awful idea, which is why the Pilot is so much more successful than WindowsCE machines. I predict Microsoft will not be able to make the transition into a company that sells very inexpensive consumer-level devices, and I predict that the market for very inexpensive, ubiquitous computing devices will make the business desktop-PC market look tiny.
Suck. I hate bandwidth-hogging, boring, rectangular images. PostScript (well, real PostScript) is better-- resolution independent, lots of bang-for-the-bit (if done right).
Nicholas Negroponte writes about this in the April 1994 issue of Wired in an article entitled "The Fax of Life: Playing a Bit Part". The point is that today's digital information doesn't capture the essence of the information, it just captures the image. For example, FAX machines are spewing images across the phone lines when there are much more efficient representations that have the added benefit of being much more easily editable, reformatted, marked up, etc.
It is interesting to me that both text (1-dimensional information) and 3D graphics (3-dimensional information) have standards that tend to be highly structured (e.g. HTML, VRML). 2D graphics seems to be the odd-man-out, with unstructured formats like GIF, PBM, JPEG. I guess the equivalent for text would be to ship around everything as audio files, and for 3D graphics the equivalent would be to ship around 3D scenes as lots and lots of little colored cubes (voxels).