[HN Gopher] Clara.io Shutting Down
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Clara.io Shutting Down
Received this email today: Hi Clara User, This is a notice that
we are retiring the Clara product and services on December 31,
2022. If you have files that you would like to continue using,
please download that content before December 31, 2022 because it
will not be available after. We apologize for any inconvenience
and thank you for using Clara. Sincerely, Clara Admin Team
Author : tarr11
Score : 43 points
Date : 2022-12-02 18:42 UTC (4 hours ago)
| bhouston wrote:
| This is true. I will post a post-mortem on it as some point in
| the next month. But I can confirm that we are shutting it down:
|
| https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@BenHouston3D/109445706917253...
|
| We (Exocortex.com) started Clara.io in 2012, launched it in 2013.
| But we stopped work on it in 2015. We then launched Threekit.com,
| which was originally built upon Clara.io tech, but then we
| rebuilt the tech stack to better suit the commercial product
| visualization market needs. Eventually Exocortex renamed itself
| Threekit as it was a viable future. Under the Threekit brand we
| have raised $65M and have grown to 100 employees.
|
| So the company behind Clara.io, Exocortex, has grown and is
| succeeding, but Clara.io never really made any money in its
| original mission as an online 3D editor. It is filled with +1M
| free users. We kept it running for 7 years after we had stopped
| development, but at some point you have to call it. It is hard to
| keep such an old tech stack running (it used pre 1.0 Node.js
| originally and still uses a highly modified 2012-era Backbone.js
| as React hadn't been invented yet.)
| mrtksn wrote:
| Wouldn't someone be interested in taking over? The domain name
| itself should be worth something too, it's a beautiful name.
| bhouston wrote:
| Name of my first daughter, Clara, who was born roughly around
| the time of launch. :)
| danrocks wrote:
| I wish I could pay you a beer to hear the whole story in
| person.
| tomp wrote:
| Why not open-source it?
| Benjamin_Dobell wrote:
| Nothing to add on Clara.io. However, just wanted to state
| that Ben Houston is/was one of the more prolific three.js
| contributors
| (https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/graphs/contributors) and
| consistently pushed three.js in a better direction. Thank
| you!
| bhouston wrote:
| Thanks! In many ways Mrdoob's Three.js was critical to
| Clara.io working. His leadership of Three.js over the past
| decade has transformed online 3D. And the community around
| Three.js was critical to it actually working. WebGL was so
| buggy on devices in 2013-2015 that it was only through
| joint community effort that we were about to work around
| those device-specific bugs.
| techsavygamer0 wrote:
| Hey Ben - thoughts on WebGPU support, and the potential
| for a web-based metaverse?
| bhouston wrote:
| I think success in a web-based metaverse isn't likely
| dependent upon technology, but rather figuring out how to
| appeal to users. But Rust/WASM+WebGPU can be very
| efficient. But building your own engine from scratch is
| not a minor undertaking.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| If 20,000 people are using it a month, why not ask some of
| them to pay?
| bhouston wrote:
| Fun fact, a lot of it is open source, just not where you
| would expect it. During the creation of Clara.io I created
| over 200 PRs to Three.js:
|
| https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3A.
| ..
|
| Open sourcing it wholesale at this point is a challenge
| because parts of the tech stack became parts of Threekit.com.
| Threekit.com is VC funded and an ongoing business operation.
|
| I do what I can with open source still, see:
|
| https://github.com/bhouston/behave-graph
|
| https://github.com/threeify/threeify
| stevage wrote:
| Wow, a million users of something that hasn't been worked on in
| 7 years? How many are active?
| bhouston wrote:
| 20K in the last month. We have a lot of hit and run users who
| mostly just want to download something from the 3D model
| library at https://clara.io/library
|
| BTW here is what free users are editing right now: https://cl
| ara.io/library?gameCheck=&public=&filter=&sort=-mo...
| eerikkivistik wrote:
| Sad to see it go, but I perfectly understand. You may or may not
| remember, but we had a chat about some of the backing tech about
| 5 years ago. I am one of the founders of 3dc.io and we are
| shutting it down for similar reasons. Ironically our tech stack
| behind both products is pretty identical.
| bhouston wrote:
| Yeah unfortunately nearly every company that tried to be a
| general web based 3D editor failed to find a market.
|
| There is a new generation now out so it will be interesting to
| see how that goes: womp, spline.design and I guess vectary is
| still around. I think there is another recent one as well but I
| can't remember the name.
|
| I think the AI driven tools is the next hot area personally.
|
| I think Blender is the real 3D editor that won over the last
| decade.
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