Begin forwarded message:
From: Chris Marrin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: November 11, 2005 11:33:14 AM EST
To: George Birbilis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: Reed Hedges <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Web3D Mailing List
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [www-vrml] Announcing Emma 0.4
George Birbilis wrote:
see the list archive, it's something with roots in VRML and in Blendo
from what I understand
What's Emma?
The members of the team all started at SGI on CosmoPlayer and
CosmoWorlds. I was involved in the original VRML spec, Murat was
involved in some of the early X3D work, Rob designed much of the user
experience for CosmoPlayer and CosmoWorlds, and Rick managed the
CosmoWorlds project. From there we spread out to Tivo and Sony and now
we have come back to work on what we think of as the next generation
of web-based, rich-media, interactive application platform.
You can read our white paper at:
http://emma3d.org/EmmaWhitePaper.pdf
On this list the most obvious question is, "why not just use X3D"? As
you might imagine, the answer to that question could start a flame war
that would go nowhere. But I would like to give a perspective, which
led to my choice to invent yet another 3D runtime.
First, let me say that I stepped out of the X3D community because I
felt that the spec process had gotten too cumbersome. I feel now that
VRML was standardized too early, got political too early, and got
corporate involvement too early. Of course, back then we felt that the
barbarians were knocking on our door, so we had to do something, FAST!
Well, the barbarians turned out to be Ken dolls and none of us, not
VRML nor any of its "competitors" were a commercial success. We all
flew too high, our wings melted, and we crashed to earth.
Ok, enough of the bad metaphors.
Since then I have been trying to understand how to make a runtime that
was practical. My work at Sony with Blendo was a great experience. We
had a lot of creative ideas and wrote some beautiful apps that were
easily deployable and had some great functionality. But Blendo is
proprietary technolology and Sony did not choose to make it widely
available. Oh well.
In the Blendo work, we had 3 goals which took us in new directions: 1)
make the scripting language bound to the core, 2) move away from a "3D
engine" to a "rich media engine", and 3) make the runtime an
application engine. (1) meant that we made scripting pervasive in the
language of Blendo, rather than having a separate, and loosly bound,
Script node. It also meant that the object model was common to both
the scripting language (Javascript) and the node set.
(2) meant that we had much more audio/video and 2D functionality. Our
2D model was based on SVG and Flash, rather than a simple "box and
oval" model. We even went as far as to have a Flash importer. Our 2D
rendering was "broadcast" quality, with sub-pixel accuracy, even for
text slanted in 3D. The quality was better than Flash and made it
possible to have very rich and ledgible on-screen presentations.
(3) meant that we added more keyboard and mouse support, the ability
to know the size of the window, full-screen rendering, and other
window oriented capabilities. It also meant that we had a strong
back-end story, with the ability to parse raw XML, do HTTP PUT and
POST, and a strong HTML page integration story. All this made it
possible to write full online, database-driven apps.
But, as I said, Sony had no interest in making this a ubiquitous web
technology, so Blendo is locked in the vault.
Then we got a great opportunity to work with Many One Networks. Emma
shares many of the goals of Blendo, while learning from its mistakes.
For instance, Emma uses Lua as its core scripting language rather than
Javascript. Lua is many times faster than Javascript and has a much
more active developer community. That means we have access to a wide
array of technologies, such as GUI toolkits, XML parsers, socket
libraries and many others. We are also making Emma even more lean than
VRML, X3D or Blendo. This will help reliability and will make it
easier to deploy an Emma app.
We are also using the great Ogre (3D) and AGG (2D) rendering
libraries. These will give us all the latest graphics capabilities,
file format import, and 2D graphics quality that we need to make Emma
a success.
Rick joined the team specifically to give us a great authoring story.
So Emma will not only be a great runtime for web applications, but a
great system for authoring them.
And all this is being done as Open Source!
We hope to get an active community not only using Emma, but extending
it as well. X3D would be a great direction to take the engine, either
with file importers or the ability to run X3D content directly. All of
this is possible because all the source is available.
In the coming months we will be working on Linux and Mac ports,
authoring tools and extending the functionality of the engine itself.
Emma is an extensible system so we will hopefully not be the only ones
adding to its capabilities. Keep watching!
And my apologies in advance if this starts a flame war :-)
--
chris marrin ,""$, "As a general rule,don't solve puzzles
[EMAIL PROTECTED] b` $ that open portals to Hell" ,,.
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```"```'" `"` `""` ""` ,P`
--
Reed Hedges
http://intterreality.org/~reed
AIM: ReedHedges
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