X3D Community Blog 
June 27, 2006
To Push the Jumbo Flyingly
X3D has come a long way. It is now humming along like a well equipped jumbo, with modularity thrown in. The new user interface and rendering initiatives will spruce it up nicely!
But wait, it’s not flying to full potential! Back when the Web was based on a pull-from paradigm, Web3D (then VRML) had plenty of good pull capability. The Web continued to evolve and became more bidirectional: much is now pushed back onto the Net. People are uploading models, photos, QTVRs and linking them to Google Earth or community portals. Chat, VOIP and videoconferencing are more commonplace and Massively Multiplayer Online Games, which require continual two-way interplay, are gaining popularity.
Web3D did not co-evolve and stuck with the pull model. There is no efficient tcp/ip networking node, no advance in http protocol support. What happened? One can use CreateX3DFromURL and LoadURL to push some URL-encoded parameters onto servers, access web services, and pull stuff back. This basic two-way http trickery is nice, but it’s like pulling the jumbo from a mini minor. You can do some more efficient and powerful tcp/ip networking inside purpose built java or C++ classes but that’s not portable. What we need is…
June 17, 2006
X3D and Ontological Space
In an X3D world, the emergent engine is the proximity sensor because it is a scalar identity of a location and locations organize the semantic tensor: the objects and methods of the spaces and the objects they contain.
The location organizes the ontology of the space. The distance organizes the relationships and force per related set. The distance is scalar by position and velocity. These values in a mapped space self-organize by the force per related set as afforded by the norms of the tensor set, or situation semantic: a spatio/temporally identified norm.
In an X3D world, events find you.
June 13, 2006
It’s time for 3D Mashups
OK, so we’ve spent like 5 or 6 years moving from VRML to X3D…what’s the point! Visually the advanced VRML browsers compete pretty well with X3D browsers but it’s time to make the XML magic really appear. Let’s see a 3D mashup. What’s a mashup…I’m glad you asked!
Mashups are the web’s way of creating a stew (note the food analogies as I’m writing this close to dinner time) from individual ingredients, each of which has nothing to do with each other, except the fact that all the pieces are food. Let’s take Google maps, nice 2D smoothly functioning maps and Amazon’s book store interface which can display popular book purchases on a per zip-code basis. Want to create a map of popular books in the a particular zip coe…no problem. Simply plug in the Amazon API’s exposed by their web services with the Google map API and voila…instant popular book map!
So what’s needed for the 3D version of this, first we need an API to X3D. OOPS I forgot…we almost have one since it’s already in XML we can just get to the data via the DOM (Document Object Model).
More interestingly what are you going to do…
June 12, 2006
Social Worlds
June 05, 2006
The future of the RawKee X3D Exporter for Maya
Now that RawKee has reached its 1.0 release I've been contemplating its future.
RawKee currently supports most X3D nodes that were also part of the VRML97 spec. In addition it has partial support for the HAnim spec (very nice actually) and partial support for the upcoming RigidBodyPhysics and IODevice components of AMD2 as well. As of release 1.0.2, we even have nice installers for versions of Maya 6 thru 7 on the Windows, OSX, and Linux operating systems
So where does it go from here...
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