Open Standards for Real-Time 3D Communication

5-10 years ago people were touting that it would only be a matter of time before everyone started building 3D web sites just like they were building HTML pages. What happened? Is it that 3D on the web failed? Or is it that many of us didn''t really understand that the Web is a much bigger and more diverse place than HTML pages? X3D, particularly in it's XML incarnation, is actually growing very very rapidly on the web. But it's not growing as HTML pages - it is growing as real XML-based applications that demand serious technical chops to develop.

Continue reading "Why is there so little usage of XML and X3D on the ‘visible Web’?" »

Posted by Len Bullard on 871 , 2006 | Permalink | (5) Comments

The world is finally starting to pay wide-scale attention to 3D! From Google Earth, to Second Life, to 3D PDFs, to COLLADA, to scores of new uses and implementations of X3D, 3D visualization has finally reached critical mass. But while it is exciting that there are so many different technology options, how do we decide which solution to use? Is there one standard that fits all markets?

Continue reading "One 3D Standard to Rule Them All?" »

Posted by Rita Turkowski on 849 , 2006 | Permalink | (1) Comments

The 3D medical imaging market is over a half billion dollars and is headed for significant growth in the next 5 years, fueled by advances in imaging hardware capability, new diagnostic techniques and low cost, high performance graphics acceleration. CT virtual recontructions of the heart, virtual fly-throughs of the colon, and molecular imaging are just the start.

Continue reading "3D: Coming soon to a medical image of you" »

Posted by Rita Turkowski on 390 , 2006 | Permalink | (1) Comments

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab’s PlanetQuest website is brilliant.  This is a stunning proof of the power of X3D as an educational format that is beautifully surreal presenting complex information compactly.  The techniques applied are ingenious but easy to use and comprehend.  This is the professional level of multimedia web content production that X3D needs.

PV Services Wirefusion-based production approach to integrating text, 2D and 3D is straightforward.  They build one dominant object and explain it in the style of a product presentation.  Each topic is presented in a mode perfectly suited to it so navigating it is childishly simple and enrapturing.

My only nit here is the sound is noisy.  Streaming sound is still the biggest quality gap in the X3D.  Multitrack sound streams that enable the spatial capabilities of real-time 3D such as proximity based mixing and soundFollowers aren’t here.  On the other hand, this sound is a vast improvement over what we had to use ten years ago so I am still blown away.  Personally, loops bore me unless other sound nodes are used with them, for example, an option to have the text entries read by a human voice (not a synth).  It only…

Continue reading "Planet Quest: Brilliant!" »

Posted by Len Bullard on 811 , 2006 | Permalink | (1) Comments

I took a look at Herbert Stockers’ paper on Follower nodes today.  The examples are quite good.  The paper is first rate.  You can find the paper at the www.bitmanagement.de site.

http://www.bitmanagement.de/documents/Stocker_06_Followers.pdf

For those of you who have yet to read this, Stocker provides a means to create filters that smooth motion of objects such as avatars by nodes that calculate movement in real time.  Read the paper to see the math and implementation.  With these nodes, for example, an avatar or other object starts and stops in a more natural manner thus simulating inertia.  Paths are calcuated to targets such that the object moves in smooth curves without the jerks and sudden stops.  If an object is, say picked up and pushed to a wall, it moves there in a smooth motion.

Stocker also gives examples of different nodes that the Followers can route to such as having color followers.  He provides protos and externprotos for these and suggests their inclusion in the spec.  At the very least, these are a great addition to the BitManagement proto library.  At best, they can be incorporated into the browsers. 

It would be interesting to apply these filters to nodes…

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Posted by Len Bullard on 560 , 2006 | Permalink | Comments