Projects Wish List

Do you want to get involved?  Here's how.  There are many interesting projects with potentially broad impact that are looking for energetic developers.  Many activities are support the rapid evolution and development of the X3Dv4 specification.

Motivated individuals with software development skills and Web authoring experience are welcome to start, or help develop, any of these candidate projects.  Diverse talents are needed... maybe you too?  There are excellent opportunities here!

All contributors are welcome to use the x3d-public mailing list (subscribe) for planning and design discussions.  We are currently reviewing and improving this page each week as part of X3D Working Group.  TODO edit, fix HTML source on this page.

Available Projects

1. Blender.  Very important, much work has progressed and efforts are well developed, has achievable goals.
   • Web3D Consortium's Blender X3D Support page is public and a great way to get involved!
   • Blender import/export is performed using Python.  Here are original announcement, email thread and Blender task.
2. HTML5 support for X3D4. 

• X_ITE (formerly Cobweb) is an excellent codebase with many features available and excellent coverage.
• X3DOM has node and component support that lacks Prototypes, NURBS, Scripts, Event Utilities, ViewpointGroup.
• TODO status: Projective Texture Modeling (PTM) component.

1. 3. Example X3D scenes for the open-source X3D Examples archives showing:
2. • MultiTexture nodes, Texturing3D and Cube map environmental texturing components.
   • Particle systems, Picking Sensor, Layering and Layout components.
   • Shader examples for all shader programming languages of interest.
   • Hello World Scenes for multi-lingual Internationalization (I18N): add your country!
3. Unity Game Manager support for X3D exporter and X3D scene loader:
   • Latest effort:  UnityX3D project on GitHub (with Web3D 2015 demo images).
   • Initial effort:   UnityX3D project on SourceForge (with example conversion).
   • Other game libraries like Unreal?
4. 3D printer and scanner support for X3D:
   • Are equipment surveys for X3D-compatible printers and scanners available, or should we together build them?
   • 3D printing export converters: Stereo Lithography (STL), PLY, Additive Manufacturing File Format (AMF) and 3MF model formats.
   • Enabling direct import of content into NIH 3D Print Exchange and other model exchanges for VR and AR applications.
   • Web3D Design Printing and Scanning Working Group is actively these topics.
5. Support for publishing X3D models

• WordPress (example Web3D Conference) and Wikipedia using X_ITE or X3DOM.
• Initial exemplar scene efforts in progress: Shay D Pixel and Titania X3D floating animation
• Style guidelines, best practices, exemplars, review by Wikimedia Foundation.

1. X3D Conversions capabilities:
   • assimp Open Asset Import Library (open-source C++) discussion email thread.
   •  Chisel is open-source Java scene graph reduction tool, written for VRML97, needs upgrade
2. X3D Server virtual machine autoconfiguration:
   • local CORS installation
   • GeoServer configured with STOQS by MBARI and 3D Blacksburg by Virginia Tech,
   • OpenBIM Building Information Management Server with X3D export, and
   • Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) stream filtering, publication by NPS
3. Image support
   • Player support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) as X3D ImageTexture, and X3D-SVG-HTML animation examples.
   • International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) and multi-resolution textures supported using X3D ImageTexture
4. X3D Unified Object Model for Scene Access Interface (SAI) integration with major tools and applications:
5. • Now highly mature. Codebases autogenerated include python and X3D Java Scene Access Interface (SAI) Library (X3DJSAIL).
   • Additional open-source Scene Access Interface (SAI) codebases for JSON, JavaScript, C#/C++/C, Python.
   • Ultraedit
   • GNU Octave (with Octave-Forge) supports a high-level interpreted language for numerical computations, similar to Matlab.
6. More candidate projects can follow... additional project proposals are welcome.

Recognition Possibilities

Web3D Consortium wants to help incentivize these efforts.  Candidate awards for great work include:

• Consortium announcements on web3d.org website and Twitter giving credit and announcing availability.
• One year's free Professional Membership in Web3D Consortium.
• Free registration for the next VR Hackathon or Web3D Conference.
• Bragging rights in some kind of Web3D Developers Hall of Fame.
• Web3D members who really want certain results might offer special rewards.
• Got questions or ideas?  Please Contact Us.

Further Improvements to Projects Wish List

Web3D Consortium is happy to add new projects here.

• X3D working group moderates community dialog and development.
• All working groups have opportunity to add and guide projects.
• Board of Directors approves awards and is advised regarding of major new efforts.
• Communications Team publicly reports significant opportunities and progress.

Is the list growing too large? We may need to avoid collecting too many - that's a good problem to have!

Additional ideas welcome, thanks for considering the possibilities.