This looks pretty interesting. At a big-picture level, they're using similar technology to OSMP - Lua scripting and Ogre3D - but they seem to have professional experience of doing something very similar before, at Sony. There seems to be a fair amount of emphasis on 2D things, such as flash. I might consider slotting in some technology into Emma, rather than continuing to build everything from scratch, but it depends on how far along they are really (didnt check yet, though the screenshots are basically a couple of ogre demo meshes, which doesnt bode really well, but who knows). Don't think they are using Python, for better or worse.
Since OSMP is more and more modular, there's no reason that modules cant be slotted easily into both OSMP and Emma, (and obviously into VOS too).
Hugh
On 11/12/05, Reed Hedges <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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" ,,.
> ,.` ,b` ,` , 1$'
> ,|` mP ,` :$$' ,mm
> ,b" b" ,` ,mm m$$ ,m ,`P$$
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> b$` ,$: :,`` |$$ ,` $$` ,|` ,$$,,`"$$ .` :$|
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> P$b, _;b$$b$1" |$$ ,` ,$$" ``' $$
> ```"```'" `"` `""` ""` ,P`
>
--
Reed Hedges
http://intterreality.org/~reed
AIM: ReedHedges
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