Extensible 3D (X3D)
Part 1: Architecture and base components

Introduction

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cube General

Extensible 3D (X3D) is a software standard for defining interactive web- and broadcast-based 3D content integrated with multimedia. X3D is intended for use on a variety of hardware devices and in a broad range of application areas such as engineering and scientific visualization, multimedia presentations, entertainment and educational titles, web pages, and shared virtual worlds. X3D is also intended to be a universal interchange format for integrated 3D graphics and multimedia. X3D is the successor to the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), the original ISO standard for web-based 3D graphics (ISO/IEC 14772). X3D improves upon VRML with new features, advanced application programmer interfaces, additional data encoding formats, stricter conformance, and a componentized architecture that allows for a modular approach to supporting the standard.

This section describes the design objectives behind the development of X3D and provides an overview of the features of X3D.

cube Design objectives

X3D has been developed to meet a specific set of market and technical requirements. To meet these requirements, X3D has adopted the following design objectives:

cube X3D features

X3D has a rich set of features to support applications such as engineering and scientific visualization, multimedia presentations, entertainment and educational titles, web pages, and shared virtual worlds. The X3D feature set includes:

For a complete list of X3D features, consult the component descriptions in clauses 7 through 42 of this document.

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