Open Standards for Real-Time 3D Communication

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GDC was a success for us on several levels and I'm so glad we made the decision to attend at the invitation of the Khronos Group! It appears that 2007 is poised to be the year of the metaverse, MMOs, and gaming on many levels, from casual to serious games. Consider this blog my post card from GDC. Read the entire blog entry...

Today I spoke to Brian Hay of Bitmanagement, and this is what he said: "Only 2 days ago, in an off-list discussion, someone said to me "the few startlingly clear VRML lines look a mess in X3D". They weren't even aware of the Classic VRML encoding of X3D, which is certainly much better for human readability. I told them the XML encoding was best for web interoperability and parsing by other software." "I myself was initially skeptical and confrontational about X3D on the mailing lists when it was being developed but I'm a convert now. There's really nothing but improvements and mostly backwards compatibility in X3D. Nothing to be scared of. A vast improvement on VRML. Better communication of the features and benefits of X3D with cool examples may help the situation." Read the entire blog entry...

I am far away from the opinion that VRML/X3D is in any kind of trouble (How many times have we heard that before?). In trouble perhaps, is misinterpreted, broken, or misguided visions of what VRML/X3D is, but in itself VRML/X3D is very well thank you. Read the entire blog entry...

So, despite premature announcements of the death of VRML, it is alive and well in the form of X3D. No other single real-time 3D technology has prevailed as long and continued to evolve despite a steady barrage of (often unfounded) criticism. Read the entire blog entry...

I am often asked why X3D and VRML players have not consolidated down to 1 or 2 implementations. The question typically comes about due to the costs of maintaining so many different implementations. Why can't we just have one solid implementation and all use that? Wouldn't it be much easier if like Flash we had one system for content authors to deploy too? Read the entire blog entry...

The Open Geospatial Consortium's current Geospatial Web efforts define standards for delivering 2D map data over the internet. What the Web3D X3D Earth initiative can contribute might be something like a "Web Viewpoint Service" - the ability to query and deliver geospatial data from a perspective other than a 2D bounding box with a zoom function - i.e. the 3D Geospatial Web. Read the entire blog entry...

The X3D working group is concluding another great year with lots of accomplishments. We have had a steady stream of specification improvements, and currently a stable X3D Revision 2 Amendment 1 (aka X3D version 3.2) is undergoing international ISO review. Viewing tools, authoring tools and content keep getting better and better. More people and more software are adopting X3D. Importers and exporters are becoming robust. The benefits of XML and ability to use other XML-related Web standards are adding lots of value. Specification comments & bug reports steadily keep coming in, making our standard stronger and better each time. We're on our way! Read the entire blog entry...

X3D/VRML has made great strides as standard for creating complex synthesized 3D worlds and visualizations. However it is a different story when it comes to the audio and sound manipulation using X3D. In general, the 3D community has struggled with how to link X3D entities and environments to interactive audio control. We've started a project to integrate FreeWRL with ReWire. This project has the potential to introduce X3D to those who are actually into making or manipulating music, beyond the traditional X3D coder base! Read the entire blog entry...

I was recently asked this question: "I don't really see why I want to generate X3D when I can just call OpenGL and write my own code.?" Sure, you can. But to write it efficiently requires lots of acquired knowledge. Read the entire blog entry...