The Web3D Consortium has been working with the DFKI (XML3D) team developing the W3C Community Group (XG) Charter for Declarative 3D. The objective of the proposed “Declarative 3D for the Web” Community Group is to explore and suggest options for integrating a declarative approach to interactive 3D graphics directly into HTML and thus enable its use in any Web page. The XG deliverable is an report on topics of interest with flexibility to let the group explore various issues. Anticipated effort is 12 months.

Web3D and Fraunhofer's recent efforts, integrating X3D with HTML and the DOM (X3DOM), enable us to lead this group along with DFKI to define and document proposed requirements for Declarative 3D using suitable use cases. Also in the scope is the comparative survey of existing standards and technologies with respect to capabilities and proposed requirements. Relative compatibility to the Architecture of the Web resulting in further activity for work on W3C Recommendations.

We have seen interesting discussions on this topic on the X3D public mailing in the recent weeks. A Declarative 3D standard has benefits/incentives in many dimensions to the Web and graphics community and also hardware manufacturers. A high level declarative 3D standard will address the Web community’s 3D needs of using a much broader set of system level and hardware options providing developers a high-level control for these options with tools to control 3D scalability. We encourage participation from other standards organizations and also leading companies interested in 3D graphics for the Web.

The kickoff meeting will take place on Wednesday. 22 June from 2-5:30 PM in Paris after the conclusion of the Web3D 2011 Conference.