[vos-d] web3d symposium report

[Peter Amstutz]

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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   ][ tetron at interreality.org ][ piamstutz at anteon.com  ]
[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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