Hi Dan Your response is pretty off topic but I'll take the bait anyway. There has been quite a bit of "fashion" (and fashion victims) in real-time, web based 3D formats and their viewers over the past 14 years. Some may remember the long list of "it" formats that have come and gone including; Blackbird, Chrome, Viewpoint, Shout3D, Atom3D, Java3D, Shockwave3D, Atmosphere, U3D and more recently Collada and its' truncated form wrapped in KML. Each was endorsed by Adobe, Intel, Microsoft, Sony or the like and touted as the next big thing. These endorsements were tied to big company product plans and market domination goals rather than practicality and user needs. Each had its' day and then failed leaving all who bought into these formats high and dry.
VRML, born in 1995, rapidly became the ISO standard for web based 3D and remained dominant until about 2001 with the "dot-bust". As with many things that are over hyped, it suffered a negative back lash fueled by the afore mentioned big corporations. Since then, it quietly added geo-registration and an XML encoding and became X3D. Those of us who care more about delivering good products to our customers than following this year's fashion, went about our business.... using X3D. Today, we have a lot of great, super smart neo-geographers that may have first experienced 3D via a game platform, SL or Google Earth. Their first 2D mash ups initially used quasi-open platforms, like Google Maps and then segued into truly open platforms such as Open Street Map. Some are beginning to explore 3D for Earth viewing and augmented reality uses. Their first experience with 3D may have come via SketchUp and GE. This was a great starting point but they learned the limits of this approach and they are now scanning the horizons for truly open, industrial strength 3D. I would encourage such people to check out X3D (www.web3d.org ) and give the topic a fair hearing (please put your ear buds in when you hear old negative knee jerk rants). X3D/VRML is also part of other standards efforts such as OGC's CityGML and MPEG4. If you like Earth globes, check out the X3D Earth effort to make an open standards / open source analog to Google Earth. Most X3D viewers are free or open source... so indulge! BTW... I can assemble a bare bones AR viewer, using X3D, in about 20 minutes... even though I am more of an artist than an engineer. I'll be happy to explain how. David Colleen Planet 9 On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 2:01 AM, David Colleen<[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Mike > > This is easy in X3D (web3d.org). Geo-referencing support is native to X3D > and one of the reasons that it is the foundation of CityGML. > > BTW... Fraunhofer should have their iPhone X3D viewer out shortly. I would > expect Java based Android clients out soon as well. Is there anything for ordinary desktop users yet (win/OSX/linux, ...) ? I used to have a bunch of VRML viewers on my desktop in the mid '90s, yet whenever I look around lately for the state of play with X3D, it feels like time has somehow run backwards. Am I missing something obvious (besides patience?) or we have a problem here? When do we get the 3d homepages that were long promised us? :) cheers, Dan _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
