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…

Continue reading "Followers" »

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

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…

Continue reading "To Push the Jumbo Flyingly" »

Posted by Chris Thorne on 503 , 2006 | Permalink | (4) Comments

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.

Continue reading "X3D and Ontological Space" »

Posted by Len Bullard on 839 , 2006 | Permalink

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…

Continue reading "It’s time for 3D Mashups" »

Posted by Rita Turkowski on 498 , 2006 | Permalink

If socialization is what people want to do in real time 3D MUs, then the goal of the designer is to enable this. To enable this, the designer must go beyond the abstraction of social behavior to the real human instances. Some worlds create general landscapes with social locations. Others pick a social behavior and design the world to meet the requirements for behaving. Of the latter type such as Jewel of Indra, the gestures, behaviors, and other semiotic constructs are the means of expressing the behavior according to the social domain or simply, culture.

Continue reading "Social Worlds" »

Posted by Len Bullard on 043 , 2006 | Permalink | Comments

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...

Continue reading "The future of the RawKee X3D Exporter for Maya" »

Posted by Aaron Bergstrom on 840 , 2006 | Permalink