Re: [x3d-public] Web3D Zeitgeist - most popular format, one year on.

[Joshua Smith <jesmith@kaon.com>]

> Well, I would use Adobe if it worked on my computer.  Yes, I have 
> acroread 7
> The only good X3D viewer on Linux, IMHO, is Octaga.  With good meaning
> that it shows most of my files with acceptable performance.

Yes, the lack of 3D support on unix/linux platforms is inexcusable.  
I'm sure that's on Adobe's to-do list, though, since they're going 
after the CAD market hard, and a lot of those guys use platforms other 
than Windows/Mac.

> The Java applet looked pretty good, but it was horribly slow.How do the
> PDFs compare?  Do you use JOGL in the Meson Applet?

The Meson Applet is a pure software renderer (no JOGL, no Java 3D), 
since "appearance" and "just works" are the most important attributes 
in the spaces we serve.  Thus, the update rate is completely dependent 
on your CPU and the speed of 2D BLTs on your video card.  If you look 
through the list of features here:
  http://www.kaon.com/software/swmeson2.html
you'll see that we do a lot of stuff (genuine Phong shading, synthetic 
chrome, 256x oversample antialiasing) that most hardware accelerators 
won't do.

3D PDFs look awesome when they are hardware accelerated, which is less 
often than they should be (for example, only the ATI-based cards in our 
office get acceleration, not the NVIDIA-based ones; again, fixing this 
is on Adobe's to-do list).

The software renderer in Adobe Reader is primitive - it lacks linear 
filtering, perspective correct texturing, etc.; visuals look about 
circa 1988.  However, for the CAD market Adobe is focused on, that 
stuff doesn't really matter, because they don't use much texture 
anyway.  Part of the strength of our tools is that we understand the 
difference between what sales & marketing applications need, and what 
the renderer provides, and do a lot of pre-processing of the models and 
textures to close that gap as much as we can.  This is particularly 
true when it comes to getting files sizes down:
  http://www.kaon.com/kb/article.php?id=017

I think the quality of software rendering in Reader will matter a lot 
less as they improve breadth of support for hardware rendering, so my 
bet is that they aren't going to do much to improve the software 
renderer.

For our customers, it's interesting to see that the degradation of 
visuals between our Applet and PDF is far outweighed by the 
desirability of having interactive 3D in a PDF.

> Also, one may get more accurate numbers on google if you use
>
> filetype:x3d       etc
> as part of your query.    The numbers look pretty even between VRML 
> and XML
> encodings of X3D, hovering around 32,000 for each

Since most 3D viewers specify the data files they are reading through 
attributes which google ignores, I would not expect this approach to be 
very accurate at all.  All that this gets you are lists of downloadable 
files, or people who are naive about handling of mime types.  In pretty 
much guarantees you'll miss the commercial applications of a 
technology.

-Joshua

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