Remix 3D

» see remix3d.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Remix 3D's whole life fits inside my thirties and it sat one category over from the work i do now, which is computer vision running on machines small enough to fly. That proximity did nothing. i never opened it, never put a model in it, and could not have told you the year it started without looking.

It opened on 26 october 2016 as a free library of 3D objects you could take from or add to. The point was not the website. The point was that it plugged into things. Paint 3D reached it, so did 3D Builder and 3D Viewer, and from inside PowerPoint or Word you could pull an object in without leaving the document. SketchUp and Minecraft had their own paths in. It shipped in eight languages, which for a hobbyist model repository is an unusual amount of budget.

That budget makes sense once you know what it was attached to. Microsoft spent late 2016 telling everybody that 3D was about to become an ordinary thing that ordinary people did, and it had a fleet of products lined up behind that sentence. Remix 3D was the part where the objects lived. Every 3D pitch Microsoft made in that period needed a place for the output to go and a place for the beginner to get a starting shape, and this was both.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was actually for ~

Paint 3D shipped in the Windows 10 Creators Update in spring 2017. Not as a download, not as a store app you chose. It arrived on the machine. Microsoft was counting the Windows 10 install base in the hundreds of millions by then, so a 3D modeling tool went out at that scale to people who had not asked for one, and Remix 3D was the supply side of that transaction.

The bet underneath it was that people would make 3D objects the way they had learned to make photographs, casually and constantly, and that a shared library would fill up on its own. What actually happened is that a 3D model is work in a way a photograph is not. You have to want the thing before you start. Most people did not want the thing.

~ the man who left ~

Kudo Tsunoda was the corporate vice president in charge of Microsoft's 3D efforts. He had come off the Kinect work at Xbox and moved to the Windows side in november 2015, which put him at the center of the idea that computers were about to be operated by gesture and voice rather than by clicking. He left his job roughly two months before the retirement notice went out.

Wikipedia records the sequence without claiming it caused anything, and this grave will do the same. What it tells you is smaller than a cause and it still says something: the effort had one person whose job it was to believe in it, and when that person stopped being there the effort had about a quarter to live.

~ the day it died ~

The notice reached users on 10 july 2019. On 7 august 2019 uploads stopped, and you could no longer sign in to a Remix 3D account from Paint 3D or from the Office apps, though models already placed in a document kept working. Then six months of a library you could take from but not add to.

On 10 january 2020 Microsoft retired the site and deleted all user-generated 3D models and the metadata attached to them from its systems. Not archived somewhere. Deleted. The instruction to users was to download their own work first and put it in OneDrive. Three years of accepting uploads and then a hard floor, which is a specific way for a library to end and not a common one.

~ where the address goes ~

remix3d.com still resolves. It sends you to support.microsoft.com, to the page where you pick a product and describe your problem to somebody. A model library that now answers with a help desk. Whatever you were looking for, the form is ready for you to explain it.

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