Article: "Bringing 3D to the Web" ( VRML/X3d, news.com ) Today, February 26, 2002
| Virtual Reality Modeling Language is back | ------------------------ from the dead -- again. | | That's the message coming from this week's | Web3D 2002 Symposium (W3D) in Tempe, Ariz., | where members of the premier Web 3D standards | group unveiled the first working draft of | Extensible 3D (X3D), a successor to VRML. | ... | X3D faces competition from proprietary | alternatives that could make their way to | market unhindered by the perennial, painstaking | search for consensus, which lies at the heart | of the standards process. Companies hawking 3D | software for the Web include Adobe Systems, | Macromedia, WildTangent and Viewpoint, | formerly MetaStream. ... | | One analyst predicted success for X3D, saying | the technology and demand for it had finally | come up to speed. | | "There is a genuine pent-up demand for this stuff," | analyst Peddie said. "What's out there now is | primitive and not very satisfying, but that's | partly because the people putting them out have | to develop them from scratch. If they could get | the same level of support and functionality | with 3D that they do with XML, you would see | amazing new developments." | http://news.com.com/2100-1023-844985.html The article misses several key points: 1) failure of VRML worlds to work reliably in practice on the web due to VRML viewers failing to render a VRML data designed for another viewer due to non-standard 'variations' on the language or ambiguities in the language, and some VRML viewers work with only a single OS or browser (often 'Windows Only' and 'IE Only') 2) The recent emergence of Java and Java3d as a tool that makes portability across high end professional engineering, research, and movie animation systems to the student and hobby markets. With VRML and Java3d we can now animate interactive Human Motion in stand-alone programs, networked applications, and in popular browsers such as Mozilla on Windows, Linux, and high end Unix workstations from IBM, Sun, HP, and SGI using Web3d's H-Anim Avatars. VRML for Games, Human and Molecular Modeling -------------- for the web, & industrial applications http://www.frontiernet.net/~imaging/games_with_java3d.html The VRML community is divided into segments: 1) 'Windows Only' and those wanting greater portability. 2) Ease of Entry vs. those demanding higher performance willing to invest in learning the newer, more powerful, portable and extensible languages. Java3d with VRML Loaders is a good solution for high performance rendering with tight control with portability across Windows, Linux, and various flavors of Unix, safely in networked systems. -- Paul, Java Developer & Web Animator ----------------------------------------------------- "Imaging the Imagined: Modeling with Math & a Keyboard" =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
