X3D - upcoming 3D standard for the net 4 comments

6 Mar 2002 @ 23:03, by Flemming Funch This is technical, so probably not for everybody. I was looking around for whatever happened to the rush towards 3D virtual reality on the web 5 years ago. At that time it looked like all sorts of things would end up in VRML pretty quickly. Virtual Reality Modeling Language was a standard for representing and exchanging 3D objects or worlds, which you could access with a plugin in your browser. The action seems to now be in X3D - Extensible 3D Graphics, which is a standard being developed by the Web3D Consortium, which is superseeding VRML. And, well, standards bodies move rather slowly, but there seems to be life in it, and they plan on having the bulk of it working by this summer. X3D includes everything that was in VRML and is downwards compatible with it. But it makes the whole thing more modular and more extensible, which should make it easier for companies to implement the standard for various purposes. And apparently it should work well with a bunch of other Internet standards, such as XML and MPEG-4. It all sounds rather promising, so maybe 3D will again become a focus on the net, in a way that actually works well for everybody this time. I still don't quite understand how this technology sort of dropped out for 5 years. I think it would be very cool for it to become widespread. I had a 3D version of my homepage 5 years ago, with icons rotating as satellites around planet earth, and one could fly through it and click on things. But it was in VRML 1.0 and the plugins in the current versions of Netscape and IE can't even read it now, it seems.

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