You get an easy CAD like 3D engine in Flash and people will build mass customization tools with it. It’s a given. There will be a million micro-factories that will rise up in Asia making every custom product you can think of using these 3D tools to directly communicate to the world wide consumer. I see this growth of mass custom as inevitable and unstoppable.

So I’m glad to see things are moving along on the 3D Flash front. Adobe has released a beta version of Flash 10 with some native 3D support, including hardware rendering. Speed wise it’s getting comparable to a regular windows application.

A company out of Russia called Alternativa Game, Ltd. has released a 3D Flash engine based on the Flash 10 called Alternativa Platform. Neat stuff. It’s private competition to open source Papervision3D

Microsoft has to be cooking up support for 3D in Silverlight, but I have yet to see any news on this. I don’t see how they can get to critical mass with Silverlight, but you can’t take them off the table as a player.

I don’t plan on working with 3D for Flash for a long while, but it’s nice to see it’s evolving into something useful for 3D consumer jewelry design in the browser.

I have said this a 100 times, but I just have to repeat it. Flash is on more machines than Windows and growing. These tools are going to give you the ability to release 3D design tools on any screen. Consumers will be able to design products on their iPhones, smartphones, micro-laptops, whatever, with the same interface as their home computer. Yes, a lot of the tools will be impractical due to screen size, but a least they have the connection/portal to the mass custom tools, databases, and community.