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Review of the Web3D 2006 Symposium: “I thought it would just be the usual suspects with incrementall
Apr 25, 2006
Sandy Ressler from the NIST, attended the Web3D 2006 Symposium on April 18-21. He recently wrote an open letter to the X3D Public List reviewing his experience.
” I haven’t seen anyone post anything about the Web3D 2006 Symposium last week so I’ll just add my impressions. I was unbelievably pleasantly surprised. I had honestly thought for quite some time that the conference should probably be postponed a year and that it would just turn out to be the usual suspects with incrementally improved demos and papers. Au contraire! The papers were damn good and really showed a high degree of maturation to the field.”
“X3D is still too complicated but the VRML/X3D browsers out there are really beginning to look good! In particular both the bitmanagement and Xj3D browsers are really showing some impressive capabilities. Shaders are making these things look like they belong to graphics from this century and the ability to interact with a lot of stuff at once is finally bringing the graphics quality up to snuff.”
“I have to mention one paper in particular…Herbert Stocker from Bitmanagement presented a talk on his paper innocuously titled: “Linear Filters - Animating Objects in a Flexible and Pleasing Way”. Stocker presented the whole talk using a customized version of BS Contact that implemented the new nodes he had designed. The entire talk consisted of 3D examples of him using these new nodes which allow for highly dynamic animations that respond to the user’s actions. Little balls follow the cursor and objects respond and animate all over the screen. It was the most impressive 3D talk I’ve seen in years!”
“What was most impressive to me was that it was clearly implemented in a rock solid browser. We’ve been putting together VRML animations that respond to user actions for years but they always seem to have nasty boundary conditions and jerky responses for example using a VCR type of control to control the animation and move it forward or reverse and so on. There are always problems. The Stocker presentations was completely solid and responded in exactly the way one would expect and there were no glitches whatsoever.”
“Maybe this 3D stuff is actually going to work!”
Apr 25, 2006
MobiX3D is a mobile player for X3D and H-Anim content, developed by HCI Lab, University of Udine. The rendering engine of the MobiX3D player supports classic lighting and shading algorithms and is based on the OpenGL ES standard. The MobiX3D player currently supports a subset of the X3D Interactive profile and the full H-Anim standard. The final goal of the project is to support the full X3D Interactive profile and the full H-Anim standard. The v0.2 release binaries are available for PocketPC using OpenGL ES 1.1 and for Intel 2700G-based devices (e.g. Dell Axim X50V) using OpenGL ES 1.0.
Apr 22, 2006
The May 1, 2006 cover story of BusinessWeek discusses how virtual environments can transform the way business operate, from training and collaboration to product design and marketing. Moreover, they postulate that virtual environments may be far more intuitive portals to the Internet than HTML and the Web. The BusinessWeek story focuses on the proprietary massively multiplayer online game Second Life. But for businesses that need an open standard to communicate across systems or platforms, X3D provides a well developed solution with rich scripting, interaction, and communication tools.
Apr 17, 2006
Xj3D is an open source X3D browser, developer library and test environment for real time 3D, virtual reality and augmented reality on the web, desktop or mobile device. The complete application toolkit has had over 50,000 downloads and has been used to prototype many extensions to the X3D spec - physics, fog, 3D textures, CAD, device abstraction, binary formats and more all began life as Xj3D extensions. A primary focus of Xj3D is conformance to the X3D spec while still maintaining high OpenGL accelerated performance. The milestone 1.0 release is available as a download for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Solaris. It implements:
- The CAD Geometry Component: This component describes CAD specific data representations for X3D environments. It maintains CAD structural relationships in a way that facilitates reuse of the CAD data in different domains. It also maintains CAD layer relationships.
- The Geospatial Component: This component provides support for geographic and geospatial applications. This support includes the ability to embed geospatial coordinates in certain X3D nodes, to support high-precision geospatial modeling, and to handle large multi-resolution terrain databases.
- The Humanoid Animation (H-Anim) Component: The H-Anim standard specifies an abstract representation for modeling 3D human figures that will allow human figures created with modeling tools from one vendor to be animated using motion capture data and animation tools from another vendor. It allows direct access to the joint hierarchy of the human figure as well as the vertices of the geometry in a way that allows animations to be generated in a model independent manner. Xj3D Version 1.0 also supports hardware-accelerated rendering of these models and their animation.
- The Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) Component: This component defines the binary layout of a series of messages used to transmit simulation information using the DIS Standard (IEEE 1278). Often used by military applications, DIS covers a wide range of data, including entity location, velocity, and orientation, and more obscure features such as electronic warfare and supply logistics. In addition to its original focus on military simulations, DIS is also used in civilian applications.
- ECMAScript and Java scripting capabilities: X3D provides developers with interfaces to both ECMAScript and Java programs to allow greater degrees of flexibility in creating their content.
- VRML Classic, XML and Binary Encodings Support: The VRML Classic Encoding allows users to create X3D objects and animation using the technique defined in the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML). The XML Encoding allows X3D files to be saved using the Extensible Markup Language. (XML) format. The Binary Encoding allows X3D files to be saved in a compact binary form. Each Binary-encoded X3D file supports all of the purposes of X3D files defined in the X3D specification and can take advantage of geometric and information-theoretic compression techniques. Xj3D Version 1.0 includes an Encodings Converter that allows users to convert from one Encoding format to another.
Read Full Press Release.
Apr 17, 2006
In order to tap the rich potential for networked virtual spaces, content designers need standards that provide better capabilities to access, manage, and use a wide range of input devices, as well as more expressive power to describe novel interaction techniques. The goal of the X3D User Interface Working group is to push the X3D specification far enough so authors can write their own custom techniques for navigation, selection, manipulation, and visualization and that their techniques can be adapted depending on the I.O device or platform used and the user’s preferences.
The component specification drafts and recommendations of this group will be presented to the X3D Spec group along with Amendment 2 updates of the X3D standard.
Apr 17, 2006
BS Contact VRML/X3D is interactive realtime 3D visualization software supporting X3D and VRML. The new v7 adds major enhancements including full Firefox support (including an XPI installer), JPEG2000 textures, stereo textures (interleaved and stereo pairs), OccluderGroup for augmented reality, X3D metadata nodes, X3D CADGeometry component, shader profile 3.0 support, many X3D field additions to standard VRML nodes, full support for all X3D file extensions, new X3D field types (xFDouble xFVec4f etc), render to hires bitmap (up to 4096 x 4096 irrespective of user’s display resolution), render scene to AVI video, use webcam and capture card input as MovieTexture URL, apply Device Context (other windows applications) to ImageTexture and more. (download available now - see PDF for more product details).
Apr 13, 2006
The X3D Abstract specification is now available with Amendement 1 integrated into the specification document. This makes it easier to use the specification. Amendment 1 to Part 1 of the X3D Abstract specification is a Final Draft Amendment on its way to ISO certification.
Apr 13, 2006
FreeWRL for OS X (Universal Binary) and Linux/Unix version 1.17 has been released. FreeWRL has been submitted to the Web3D Consortium for testing against the X3D ‘Interchange’ profile. This version includes MultiTexture support; many bug fixes, and improved pull down menus. FreeWRL runs standalone, but will run as an HTML browser plug-in.
Apr 07, 2006
The X3D public mailing list had a recent discussion about the many X3D viewing and development implementations available addressing different markets and development frameworks. These include:
Open Source
- Carina Viewer
- CyberX3D
- FreeWRL
- H3D
- X3D Toolkit
- Xj3D
Commercial
- Avalon
- BS Contact VRML/X3D
- Flux Player, VizX3D
- JINX
- Octaga
- Open Inventor
- Venues
Apr 05, 2006
The X3D group will hold an X3D working group meeting at the Web3D Symposium on Friday April 21 from 11:30am - 10PM.
The first 2 hours will be an open working group meeting. All members of the public are invited. We will give presentations of recent X3D features and an X3D road map of features to come.
From 1:30 to 10PM we will work on X3D revision topics. The main goal of this meeting is to finalize the layers specification. This part of the meeting is open to all current Web3D consortium members.
