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Alright, I returned friday night, safe and sound, from the Web3D
Symposium. These are the guys who are doing VRML/X3D (web3d.org).
Some impressions:
* X3D is not dead. There are at least enough people working on it to
fill a room, and a few (small) companies making money building things on
the technology.
* I would say that X3D shares about 80% of our goals with VOS. It's that
last 20%, and the technical requirements/design behind it, that may be
difficult to reconcile.
* People are working on multiuser for X3D, but it is along the lines of
DIS PDU's over XMPP. It is unlikely that this would have anywhere near
the capabilities that a more integrated VOS solution can provide.
(For those who can't decompress those acronyms: DIS = Distributed
Interactive Simulation, PDU = Program Data Unit (a packet), XMPP =
Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (Jabber)).
I also got a chance to meet Braden McDaniel (OpenVRML), Benjamin Mesing
and Andy (adu on IRC) in person, which was great.
So, while I was at the conference and surrounded by the X3D vibe, I was
seriously considering throwing out A3DL in favor of a new set of object
types that were more literally based on the X3D object model and taking
VOS in a whole new direction of being a multi-user X3D browser. Having
had a chance to think about it some more and to talk to Reed and Kao and
others on IRC, I have decided maybe that is not such a good idea :-)
However, I would like to move X3D support (via mapping X3D into A3DL) up
on the to-do list a bit. X3D defines an "interchange profile" which is a
subset of the standard which just describes geometry, texturing and
animation. Reed has been working on some code to connect OpenVRML to
A3DL, so I think it would certainly make more content available to us if
we could use that.
We can also mine X3D for ideas such has how to do skeletal animation
(H-Anim) or shaders.
Anyways, I'm putting it on the 0.24 todo list for the next version of VOS
to at least be able to load static VRML geometry and basic animations.
[ Peter Amstutz ][ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ][ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ]
[Lead Programmer][Interreality Project][Virtual Reality for the Internet]
[ VOS: Next Generation Internet Communication][ http://interreality.org ]
[ http://interreality.org/~tetron ][ pgpkey: pgpkeys.mit.edu 18C21DF7 ]
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