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 provides a background to describes the design objectives behind the development of X3D, and provides an overview of the features of X3D and a description of the X3D specification process.

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 40 42 of this part of ISO/IEC 19775.

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