X3D version 3.4 Development

Strategic overview

X3D version 3.4 Development efforts are evolutionary improvements to the widely proven X3D Graphics architecture.

Web3D Consortium working groups currently define specification goals and requirements. Working group efforts are often the focus for defining and testing new X3D components.

We publicly review these goals annually during Web3D Conference and SIGGRAPH BOF meetings.

Suggestions, development and discussion via the x3d-public mailing list is ongoing. X3D version 3.4 progress also informs and helps to extend X3D version 4.0 Development.

Candidate capabilities

The following list shows that a lot of interesting capabilities have been proposed and are under way for X3D version 3.4. However, topics on this list are not guaranteed to be completed! Rather these are all works in progress, and activity proceeds based on technical contributions and Web3D Consortium Member priorities.

• Appearance
  • Materials: advanced parameters
  • Multitexture: review for correctness, completeness and conformance of rendering example scenes
  • Rendering: bump maps, shadows
  • Shaders: improved support and better interoperability, library of examples
  • Texturing: Texture atlas, projective texture mapping (PTM), required or recommended formats for imagery and video (.gif .bmp .svg .flv etc.)
• Audio and video: adding royalty-free formats, streamability, aural spatialization using reflection from simple geometry
• Computer Aided Design (CAD) Interactive/Mobile Profile, to include:
  • CADInterchange profile plus FillProperties/LineProperties, primitive/Geometry2D nodes, Extrusion, NURBS, ClipPlane
  • Part selection/animation, 3D printing, Compressed Binary Encoding (CBE), possibly annotations component
• ECMAScript (Javascript) specification revision: confirm compatibility with X3D scripting
• Generalized input/output interface support
  • Possibly Virtual Reality Peripheral Network (VRPN), gesture recognition (such as KINECT), etc.
  • Some overlap with Augmented Reality Continuum (ARC) effort in X3D 4.0.
• Geospatial X3D component: spatial reference frame (SRF) and KML support, OGC 3D Portrayal, GpsSensor, OpenLayer mashups
• Humanoid Animation (H-Anim) new work items, including skeleton and skinning improvements
• Medical working group improvements
  • Annotations component and metadata usage, haptics and soft-body physics components
  • Archival 3D medical records, potential emphasis on Traumatic brain injury (TBI) volume visualization
• Networking: consider NetworkSensor and event-passing issues, streaming using JSON, server-side 3D topics
• Security and privacy: conduct formal review to ensure that strengths and potential vulnerabilities are formally documented.
• Viewing and navigation: cinematic camera control, alternative navigation types (such as PAN, TURNTABLE etc.), Recommended navigation behaviours review

All suggestions and recommendations are welcome. Component improvements and additions are approved by Web3D Consortium members.

Please contact us if you think additional technologies need to be considered.

Backwards and forwards compatibility

Thanks to careful design and insistence on implementation/evaluation, the X3D International Standard has maintained both steady growth and interoperability ever since Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) in 1997. This track record of stability and innovation is among the best in the 3D graphics industry.

X3D version 4.0 Development efforts are focused on HTML5/Declarative 3D/X3DOM and Augmented Reality Continuum (ARC) technologies, which may require architectural changes. Some new technologies may get pushed from 4.0 to 3.4 (or back again) after careful consideration by the respective working groups.

• As with all other X3D components, all work is defined in the abstract specification has corresponding file encodings (.x3d .x3dv .x3db) and language bindings (ECMAScript and Java).
• Compatibility concerns include evolutionary efforts to upgrade the X3D Compressed Binary Encoding (CBE), as described in the X3D Compressed Binary Encoding Call For Contributions.

• ECMAscript (JavaScript) support in X3D needs to be upgraded to new standard
  • ISO/IEC 16262:2011 Information technology — ECMAScript language specification (.zip download)
  • Downloadable from ISO Publicly Available Standards site without charge
  • This relates to 19777-1 Part 2, X3D Scene Access Interface (SAI) language bindings for EcmaScript

Schedule

• X3D CADInterchange/Mobile Profile goal. Working on implementations now, target completion December 2013.
• X3D Compressed Binary Encoding (CBE) goal. Finish draft by December 2013, review completeness of geometric compression contributions.
• X3D version 3.4 goal. Review progress in one year at SIGGRAPH 2014, members decide if work continues or draft specification proceeds to ISO.