Open Standards for Real-Time 3D Communication

Make it simple.

If you spent weeks, months or years creating a symphony and then came back to it ten years later, you would want it to still be playable by competent musicians.  Right? Some 3D artists want the same thing and today, the best deal they have for that is VRML/X3D.  I still have the Irishspace CD, a project that was large in scope when it was created over ten years ago by a team of VRML artists from around the world.  My son pulled it out to test his new computer.  He downloaded a Blaxxun Contact VRML/X3D client for free.  He put the CD on.  Guess what?  It all still works.  The difference is, it looks better and runs faster.

Ten years ago I started work on the River of Life world.  This week after a long hiatus, I’m working on it again.  I haven’t changed any of the geometry.  I’ve retextured. I’ve added new features.  It all works.  I put a proto in it for a sky simulation that Braden McDaniel wrote so long ago that he’d forgotten he wrote it until I showed it to him.  I plopped it in the middle of ROL.  It works. …

Continue reading "To The Artists and Content Owners" »

Posted by Len Bullard on 421 , 2006 | Permalink | (4) Comments

There has been a lot of discussion comparing VRML/X3D to Second Life (SL) and MMORPG such as World of Warcraft (WOW). To some it appears that X3D is simply too difficult to use and the money is going to be made in SL or similar “user friendly environment” that are focused on social spaces and shared worlds. The argument further goes that building behaviors and hacking geometry in VRML/X3D are too difficult for mass market use.

Continue reading "VRML and X3D don’t suck. If we don’t get that, we suck." »

Posted by Len Bullard on 600 , 2006 | Permalink | (3) Comments

In the evolution of a technology family based on standards and specifications, there comes a point where an unnoticeable shift begins away from the academic or early-adopter dominance of the market for that technology and toward the commercial users.  X3D/VRML has reached that point.

Continue reading "The Quiet Tipping Point of Commercial Standards" »

Posted by Len Bullard on 455 , 2006 | Permalink | Comments

I first heard about VRML back in 1996 from a local (Fargo, ND) web-developer who described it to me as “HTML for 3D”. While I’m sure he got this from someone who described VRML to him, the main point that came across to me was that VRML was as easy to use as HTML, and it would one day become as prevalent. Possibly, one day, a content author could place both HTML and VRML text within the same text document. Skipping a head ten years we still wait for Web3D technology to equal HTML as a means for conveying information over the web, and we still need seperate plug-ins to display our X3D content. Its not as easy as the 1996 hype first made it out to be.

Recently, however, two major HTML Browser manufactures, Opera and Mozilla, have begun working together under the banner of the WHAT Working Group (http://www.whatwg.org/) to develop 3D rendering capabilities for the <canvas> tag. The <canvas> tag was first introduced by Apple in the Safari 1.3 HTML browser for the purpose of dynamically rendering 2d vector graphics.

Continue reading "3D capable <canvas> HTML Tag by Opera & Mozilla" »

Posted by Aaron Bergstrom on 633 , 2006 | Permalink | Comments

Essentially, the future of embed gives you the equivalent of the animated .gif option for X3D. Everything interactive you want to do in your scene has got to be in the scene already. Once its loaded, it must be treated as a complete object with no access to its internal properties. But Hey, that is OK, because the .x3d object, like the animated .gif object, can do anything it wants as long as it stays in it's container.

Continue reading "Let’s not Get over-hyped about AjaX3D!" »

Posted by Joe D Williams on 690 , 2006 | Permalink | Comments

If it won't work cross these two browsers using the simplist way, let's try the next simplist way by leveraging Tony's Ajax3D.org tutorials to get this done. I think we can predict that if we keep it simple Ajax, we can get it to work in both IE and Ff.

Continue reading "Do we have to use an Extended DOM for Ajax3D?" »

Posted by Joe D Williams on 625 , 2006 | Permalink

Ajax3D offers a solid beginning for server-side event-driven logic combined with a client-side rich 3D GUI in X3D. What we need in addition, is a commercial library of drag and drop components for building applications. The 3D Generation is coming of working age and starting to buy. I like free plug-ins like everyone else, but the competitive-edge is in the latest and greatest. Companies beyond the Consortium members need to support the X3D formats too. X3D and SAI have to be to real-time 3D what wav files and VST are to music.

Continue reading "Can X3D and SAI be to real-time 3D what wav files and VST are to music?" »

Posted by Len Bullard on 743 , 2006 | Permalink

Wouldn't it be lovely if we didn't have to concern ourselves with the html? So far, it remains Not Possible to present a single html object tag that provides sufficient guidance for both Firefox and IE, for instance. The way to show active content using X3D hosted on a typical html/xhtml web browser is to use simple ecmascript to evaluate a basic browser capability check and generate a specific object element based on browser object implementation preferences and capabilities.

Continue reading "AJAX3D - cross-browser html object how to" »

Posted by Joe D Williams on 807 , 2006 | Permalink | (2) Comments

The hot things in 3D today seems to be anything dealing with 3D cartography, mobile, medical imaging and social networking. All of these were strongly represented at our SIGGRAPH talks. All of these areas present unique challenges and opportunities for X3D's advancement as more than an ISO standard, but as a popular real world solution to 3D communications.

Continue reading "What’s hot in 3D today?:  Cartography, mobile, medical imaging and social networking" »

Posted by Rita Turkowski on 923 , 2006 | Permalink | (1) Comments

Recently there has been a lot of conversation on the public mailing lists about COLLADA and X3D. As is usual with standards discussions, there is an attempt to create a "which is better" division - kind of a World Wrestling Entertainment Smackdown between COLLADA and X3D. But I think that spectacle is artificially contrived and created in part by confusion about what goals and markets X3D and COLLADA actually target.

Continue reading "X3D COLLADA SmackDown! - a contrived spectacle?" »

Posted by Rita Turkowski on 605 , 2006 | Permalink | (1) Comments