Open Standards for Real-Time 3D Communication

3D Content for a Lifetime: The 14th Annual Web3D Symposium Celebrates Milestone of Innovation and Durability
The fourteenth annual International Web3D Symposium will showcase X3D, the only open, royalty-free and ISO-certified technology available today for interactive 3D graphics on the World Wide Web. With over a decade of innovation X3D continues to grow and provide unprecedented value for the capability, longevity, and ownership of 3D content. Come see these innovative X3D systems and learn how to protect your 3D content investment for a lifetime. Join the Web3D Consortium and become a part of this evolving standard.
Menlo Park, CA (PRWEB) May 21, 2009—The fourteenth annual International Web3D Symposium (http://www.web3d2009.org), to be held at Fraunhofer IGD (http://www.igd.fraunhofer.de) in Darmstadt, Germany from June 15-17, 2009, will celebrate a decade of innovation and interoperability through the Extensible 3D (X3D) Standard. The ISO-certified X3D Standard provides a feature-rich language to author, integrate and deliver interactive 3D multimedia virtual environments over the network. After its first decade as the only open and royalty-free technology for interactive 3D on the World Wide Web, the Web3D Consortium’s (http://www.web3d.org) X3D Standard continues to grow and provide unprecedented value for the capability, longevity, and ownership of 3D content: 3D content for a lifetime.
Over the last decade, the use of X3D (http://www.web3d.org/x3d) systems has increased steadily throughout the world, delivering durable applications in industry, science, medicine, culture, entertainment and education. Indeed, worlds and scenarios authored over ten years ago still run today and are faster than ever. The Web3D Symposium is sponsored by ACM SIGGRAPH in cooperation with Eurographics, and the Web3D Consortium. The Symposium is a major annual event that unites researchers, developers, and content creators in a dynamic learning environment to address a wide range of topics related to 3D multimedia on the Web. With peer-reviewed papers, workshops, tutorials, and panels, the Web3D Symposium provides a potent opportunity to discuss advances in Web3D including the latest research activities and industry standards initiatives.
At the Symposium, industry leaders will demonstrate how to implement interoperable systems that can guarantee a long lifetime for interactive 3D content. X3D leads the way in today’s growing and competitive 3D markets by protecting the long-term ownership and use of 3D content through an open format without vendor lock-in. With years of experience, continuity of operations, and a partnership with International Organization for Standards (ISO), Web3D Consortium’s standard X3D is the only Extensible Markup Language (XML) based royalty-free and ISO-certified standard for 3D interchange and runtime architecture for 3D content authors today.
Many technologies grow exponentially due to hype and then fall into disuse. X3D remains the most widely used standard for the implementation of high-integrity, high-capability and high-data value 3D systems. The applications and technologies showcased at the Symposium are evidence of the healthy ecology that continues to evolve and stabilize into international standards. Descriptions of recent projects using X3D are available at http://www.web3d.org/casestudies.
X3D systems have a proven track record of protecting content and have the process in place to support projects that require their content lifetime to exceed 50 years. Because X3D is a direct evolution of Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), there are models over a decade old that run in the newest X3D players. It is not necessary to excavate the original 3D players to run that content. The business value - the virtual world content - survived, and the investment was protected. The open nature of the Web3D languages protects the content and the rights of the business.
The X3D ISO standard is open and free of IP restrictions; it is straightforward to implement, easy to learn, and provides the basis for building sharable content. X3D brings 3D graphics expression to a wider audience not necessarily trained in the art of 3D graphics programming. X3D is a scene graph representation and behavior model that sits a layer above OpenGL or DirectX renderers. With X3D, developers can build rich environments for their data without needing to understand low-level graphics APIs - X3D players handle the interface to the graphics system. X3D developers can use a wide variety of common digital content creation tools to create X3D models and animations. Through scene markup and scripting, behaviors and interactivity can bring worlds to life using ECMAScript, Java or other languages. As the platform-independent web-enabled language, X3D is the HTML for 3D Web pages.
The Web3D Consortium and its working groups oversee advancements in the X3D specification. Recent advancements in X3D include many improvements and extensions to the specification, including XML Security and Compressed Binary Encoding. The Humanoid Animation (H-Anim) effort ensures that the specification is flexible and consistent for H-Anim human figure models. The X3D-Earth project now has a standards-based 3D visualization infrastructure for visualizing all manner of real-world objects and information constructs in a geospatial context. The CAD working group is developing native support for industry-wide Boundary Representations (BREPS). The Medical Working Group is developing volume rendering and annotation capabilities to work within the X3D construct.
Come see these innovative X3D systems and learn how to protect your 3D content investment for a lifetime. To register for the 2009 Web3D Symposium please visit: //http:www.web3d2009.org/registration. X3D systems will also be demonstrated at SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans, USA.
You can join the Web3D Consortium and become a part of this evolving standard for 3D systems. To join, please visit us at: http://web3d.org/membership/join. All members are empowered to participate in Consortium Working Groups, network with leading Web3D technologists, and contribute to the X3D specification. If you need additional information about this technology, or information about member companies and their X3D lifetime implementations, please contact Anita Havele, Executive Director of the Web3D Consortium at anita.havele (at) web3d.org or +1 (248)342-7662.