Open Standards for Real-Time 3D Communication

X3D Community Weblog

What is X3D?

X3D is an initiative to leverage 3D as digital media as easily as we do with text and 2D graphics. It provides the technology to enable customers to view, modify, customize and reuse 3D visualizations in other applications on the web or on any network device from cell phones to supercomputers.

• Industry Standard
  X3D is is a royalty free, ISO-ratified format for quick and easy sharing of real-time 3D models, visual effects, behavioral modeling, and interaction. Using X3D, high-quality 2D, 3D and video information can be easily incorporated into technical publishing, maintenance manuals, websites, mashups, database applications, visual simulations, navigation systems and many other professional and consumer uses.
• Collaboration
  With X3D, 3D data can be seamlessly integrated with the rest of a company's business processes. 3D information created by technical departments can be accessible to the extended enterprise. Numeric and geospatial can be accessed in more intuitive and accessible interactive 3D visualizations.
• Interactive
  X3D allows a user to associate behaviors and dynamic scripts with a 3D object so others can interact with it, like playing a video game.
• Easy to Adopt - Reliable for Archiving
  X3D provides an XML encoding so that interactive 3D and multimedia content can be read or written using standard XML tools and can be integrated seamlessly into any XML enabled application or web service. This enables any application to add components for 3D visualization, augmented reality and collaboration. ecause X3D is an open XML standard, it is not dependent on the continued existence of any one organization. Assets exported to or created in X3D will be usable at any future date.
• Extensible
  Developers can exploit X3D component architecture and XML schema to implement it in their own applications or extend/customize the schema to add vertical market specific capabilities or custom data to the format.
• Suitable for Networks
  X3D enables users to share live 3D data quickly and easily in a lightweight format. The binary encoding offers extreme compression while preserving geometry and is therefore well suited for networked consumption of 3D. File sizes are up to 90 percent smaller than those of existing formats so they can be loaded and transferred rapidly on the Web or cell phones for use use in real time collaborative systems.
• Easy to Share
  X3D provides an Interchange format for integrated 3D graphics and multimedia to enable content producers to share 3D, interactivity, and physics between applications.

X3D Overview Specifications Developer Resources Message Boards