I think you might be exaggerating how inaccessible 3d animation and rendering is. Pretty much anyone can download Blender3d (blender.org) and learn it in a year or two well enough to make decent animations. (It'd take a lot of practice, of course, but it's still not that hard)
I think most people tend to take for granted how difficult most software is to use. Blender is free, yes, but the UI is far from intuitive, even for hardened veterans in the industry. Even supposedly no-brainer apps like 3dsmax has a extreme learning curve. We've all sort of accepted this as the Way Things Are.
For comparison, I heard a talk by a very interesting startup about a year ago that was doing n-sided patch modeling... which is to say that artists were able to literally draw the primary curves of the shape they were trying to make, and not to concerned at all with quad-patches, lining up the vertices, etc etc. Artists with little to no experience in CAD/3D modeling were able to make complex shapes but merely drawing.
That is the kind of universal usability that the article's predictors were dreaming of, not the convoluted, brain-dead UI we got instead. When I read that article I cannot help but think of how it describes a software world that could have been, if people really just gave a crap about usability.
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I think you might be exaggerating how inaccessible 3d animation and rendering is. Pretty much anyone can download Blender3d (blender.org) and learn it in a year or two well enough to make decent animations. (It'd take a lot of practice, of course, but it's still not that hard)
I think most people tend to take for granted how difficult most software is to use. Blender is free, yes, but the UI is far from intuitive, even for hardened veterans in the industry. Even supposedly no-brainer apps like 3dsmax has a extreme learning curve. We've all sort of accepted this as the Way Things Are.
For comparison, I heard a talk by a very interesting startup about a year ago that was doing n-sided patch modeling... which is to say that artists were able to literally draw the primary curves of the shape they were trying to make, and not to concerned at all with quad-patches, lining up the vertices, etc etc. Artists with little to no experience in CAD/3D modeling were able to make complex shapes but merely drawing.
That is the kind of universal usability that the article's predictors were dreaming of, not the convoluted, brain-dead UI we got instead. When I read that article I cannot help but think of how it describes a software world that could have been, if people really just gave a crap about usability.