TVR 3101 VIRTUAL REALITY
Assignment 1
Topic 8:
Web3D () - various working groups
Group members:
Nurul Fathiyah bt Abdul Muen98100319
Hardy Irwan b Maarof1991125501
Safura bt Sabir98100322
Wan Ezreen bt Wan Sharifudin98102782
Nur Azrah bt Sulaeman98101585
Topic 8
Web3D () – various working groups
The Web3D Consortium was formed to provide a forum for the creation of open standards for Web3D specifications, and to accelerate the worldwide demand for products based on these standards through the sponsorship of market and user education programs. Currently, many organizations have been using the Web3D applications in many fields for some purposes. Apart from that, this community has spearheaded the development of the VRML 1.0 and 2.0 specifications, which provide the basis for the development of associated applications. The organizations involved in this effort felt that the creation of an open consortium focused exclusively on Web3D would provide the structure necessary to stabilize, standardize, and nurture the technology for the entire community. This open consortium with focusing on the Web3D gives many advantages to the entire community by providing a good structure necessary to stabilize, standardize, and nurture the 3D technologies on the Internet.
The Web3D Consortium maintains mailing lists for general Web3D issues and specific Working Groups which collaborate openly on developing Web3D Recommended Practices, standards, and technologies and function under the jurisdiction of one or more of the Consortium's Teams. The Teams review and vote on proposals provided by Working Groups, following a well documented, tried-and-true process. The process includes six-monthly pulse checks where groups report their progress and status. Basically, in this Web3D consortium they are about sixteen different working groups that have been formed to provide, implement and maintain all the related functionalities that has been specified for each of it.
The X3D is one of the working groups that creating the foundation for the X3D initiative by defining the X3D core specification and by continuing to define, implement and promote the XML bindings for X3D. X3D is stands for Extensible 3D, which is the next-generation open standard for 3D on the web. It can easily be supported by content creation tools, proprietary browsers, and other 3D applications, both for importing and exporting. It replaces VRML, but also provides compatibility with existing VRML content and browsers. Existing VRML content will be played without modification in any X3D-2 browser, and new X3D-1 and X3D-2 content can be read in to existing VRML applications. X3D addresses the limitations of VRML. It is fully specified, so content will be fully compatible. It is extensible, which means X3D can be used to make a small, efficient 3D animation player, or can be used to support the latest streaming or rendering extensions. It supports multiple encodings and APIs, so it can easily be integrated with Web browsers through XML or with other applications. In addition to close ties with XML, X3D is the technology behind MPEG-4's 3D support.
VRML-IPR or Intellectual Property Rights working group is responsible to survey standard-related IPR and source licensing issues and recommend policies to the consortium. Its goals include doing survey and summarize on intellectual property rights issues concerning standards-based software and licensing schemes by building a list of online references and FAQ, and also developing discussion draft licenses. Besides that, they also have to make appropriate recommendations consistent with existing VRMLC IPR for the working group software products and sample implementations. This group will also generates a list of their needs or requirements, which then can be use in their discussions of the various existing licenses.
Source Code Management working group is responsible to manage and develop the source code maintained by the Web3D Consortium. This currently includes the blaxxun contact source code (VRML browser) as well as the XJ3D loader (VRML and X3D browser) under CVS. Actually, the VRML community is plagued by a lack of VRML97 conformant browsers. In order to succeed, the community cannot depend on external companies to implement its dreams and visions. As a result, this task group is formed to develop public source browsers that the community can call its own. One of the source code, Xj3D browser is an Open Source project to develop a spec-complaint implementation of the X3D and VRML97 specifications. It was started with a donation of source from Sun Microsystems in 1998 and today is a project of the Web3D consortium's source task group. Other than that is a source code license to certain of blaxxun’s VRML products in an effort to create a platform for implementation, integration with applications, conformance testing and further innovation of Web3D standards.
Web3D-MPEG is a new Web3D Consortium working group established specifically to advance the ongoing convergence of Web3D and Motion Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) standards. On other word, it offers a gateway into the MPEG community specifically for Web3D Members that wish to contribute to the development of new and emerging MPEG standards. Generally, MPEG is an ISO/IEC working group responsible for developing international standards for the coded representation of digital audio and video, and it also develops standards for 2D and 3D as well. Building on the success of its Emmy Award winning MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards, the group's MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 efforts are today emerging as comprehensive standards for networked multimedia and content description, respectively, while the newly launched MPEG-21 effort promises to deliver a standardized multimedia framework in the future.
Rich Media 3D (RM3D) working group is organized by the Web3D Consortium to develop a standard to describe multimedia content in the context of a 3D presentation engine. The standard is both to inform and be interoperable with other standards in this space, such as VRML200x and MPEG-4. This group is also anticipating high quality media that scales across a variety of platforms, including the Web, with appropriate media elements for the target platform and available bandwidth. Rich Media is actually a content that leverages dynamic graphics, animation, and/or audio/video (A/V) to be compelling and entertaining. It can serve as the foundation for Interactive TV class applications, with the Internet as one possible delivery channel. The term "rich media" is typically associated with the Web.
The vrml-conf (Conformance working group) has been merged with the vrml-cfwg working group.
The goal of this Conformance working group is to provide a forum where conformance-testing issues can be discussed. In particular, this group will identify areas where implementations are diverging, and determine appropriate courses of action. Results of those actions may produce products that will provide education materials, feedback into the standard process, feedback to developers and also develop meaningful tests and diagnostic tools.
Content Development working group is needed to support Web 3D content development and Web 3D content developers. Its main goals are develop and maintain resources for content developers, which includes the VRML Repository, VRML FAQ, the VRML Archive Network (VAN), and other related Web3D resources; provide an interface mechanism for other working groups to solicit comments for their own needs from content developers and to encourage content developers to participate directly in other consortium working groups; determine recommendations for undergraduate and graduate courses that teach VRML content creation; work with the UMEL WG to provide a easy to use mechanism of search the VAN and UMEL databases; advocate Web3D content to the Consortium and others; and lastly support the development of a network of local web 3D user groups.
Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS)-Java-VRML Working Group is responsible to develop a free software library, written in Java and interoperable with both DIS and VRML. This will establish initial networking conventions for building multicast-capable large-scale virtual environments (LSVEs) because these
DIS, Java and VRML can provide all of the pertinent capabilities needed to implement this LSVEs. The DIS is essentially a behavior protocol tuned for physics-based (i.e. "real world") many-to-many interactions, while Java is the programming language used to implement the DIS protocol, perform math calculations, communicate with the network and communicate with the VRML scene. VRML 3D graphics are used to model and render both local and remote entities in shared virtual worlds.
According to Dr. Martin Reddy and Dr. Lee Iverson, the authors of SRI International, GeoVRML 1.0 provides a suite of solutions for representing and visualizing geographic data using a standard VRML97 (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) browser. Among the capabilities or features of GeoVRML 1.0 are Coordinate Systems, Precision, Scalability, Metadata, Animation, Introspection and Navigation. The concepts that have been discussed by the authors regarding GeoVRML are the specification of geographic coordinate systems, the representation of large multi-resolution terrain datasets, the issues of dealing with limited precision floating point values, and the issues surrounding navigation of large geographic areas. The nodes in GeoVRML provide various features that are particularly useful in the modeling of geospatial data. Each node has its own name and description such as, Node Name: GeoCoordinate, Description: Build geometry using geographic coordinates. These nodes are featured in Representing Geographic Coordinates, World Scale and Navigation Issues, Specifying a Gegraphic Coordinate System and Specifying a Local Coordinate System.
H-Anim (Humanoid Animation Specification) 2001 specifies a standard way of representing humanoids in VRML97. This standard will allow humanoids created using authoring tools from one vendor to be animated using tools from another. H-Anim humanoids can be animated using keyframing, inverse kinematics, performance animation systems and other techniques. The nodes in H-Anim include Humanoid, Joint, Segment, Site and Displacer. Each node is capable of joining with another nodes to complete a H-Anim humanoid.
VRML-EAI (External Authoring Interface) represents a new functional area of the VRML97 Spec. The EAI represents the first expansion of the VRML97 specification. It becomes Part 2 of ISO/IEC 14772. The two main concepts that had been stated by the two chair persons in proposing a project on VRML-EAI, Andrew Phelps from Rochester Institute of Technology and J. Eric Mason from VR-Telecom are to create an interface between the external environment and the VRML scene and also to create a section or sections detailing the bindings to specific external environments.
The User Input Working Group is designed to implement extension nodes to allow VRML World creators to have access to hardware devices, which supply data concerning the physical actions of the end user which was limited to keyboard input earlier. The main objectives of this working group are to propose one or more nodes that allow content creators to get access to input devices, to encourage several browser implementers to implement these nodes, to have the VRML Consortium accept the extensions as Recommended Practice, and, eventually, to have them accepted as part of some future revision of the core VRML 2.0 specification. In achieving the goals in creating this working group a library of applet(s) or plug-in(s) is created which can send appropriate events to a VRML World based on the events generated by the actual hardware. For those VRML worlds, which need to make use of the Keyboard or other input device(s), appropriate applets or plug-ins can be loaded.
Universal Media allows a more realistic approach of online Web3D worlds (VRML, Java 3D, and other online 3D technologies). However is decreases network downloads by defining a small, cross-platform library of locally resident media elements (textures, sounds and 3D objects) and a uniform resource name (URN) mechanism by which Web3D content creators can incorporate these media elements into their worlds. Aside from that, Universal Media also allows content authors or users to create media-rich worlds that can be instantly loaded over even the slowest dial-up modem Internet connections. Content created using Universal Media loads, on average, 20 to 50 times faster then it would otherwise. The Web3D Consortium's Universal Media Working Group ( is defining cross-platform media libraries comprised of textures, sounds and 3D objects that reside on the client (end user computer systems). Universal Media is distributed freely through the Web3D Consortium.
VRTP is designed to support interlinked VRML worlds in the same manner as http was designed to support interlinked HTML pages. With VRTP additional capabilities for many-to-many peer-to-peer communications plus network monitoring can be combined with the client-server capabilities of http. The main goal in developing VRTP (Virtual Reality Transfer Protocol) is to provide client, server, multicast streaming & network-monitoring capabilities in support of internetworked 3D graphics and large-scale virtual environments (LSVEs). VRTP appears to be a necessary next step in the deployment of all-encompassing interactive internetworked 3D worlds. It can also be optimized in two ways, which is on individual desktops (PCs) and across the Internet.
VRML Streaming is developed as a working group with the objectives to deliver a clear definition of the problem set to be solved, possible forming other working groups, to deliver a conceptual design describing the architecture of VS and how it interfaces to the VRML scene graph, and to deliver a final specification of the standards and how they interface to the VRML 2.0 scene graph. This result could either be included in a future version of the VRML specification or as an informative annex to the current specification. Streaming using VRML-Streams includes streaming audio & video for AudioClips & MovieTextures, streaming arbitrary data into a VRML 2.0 world to continuously update the values of fields within nodes of the scene graph, streaming updates to the VRML scene graph (delete, add & change nodes & routes) and streaming a VRML world (i.e. the scene graph) including extensive geometry (IndexFaceSets) and textures. The VRML Enterprise Technology is designed to provide enabling standards and technology for the use of VRML in enterprise applications. The Enterprise Technology Working Group is a technical committee of the Web3D Consortium. The current goals are to deliver specifications for the integration of XML and CORBA technology into VRML. The documents applied in the Enterprise Technology includes Data Extensions, Metadata, Database API, Visual XML, SQL3D, Integrated XML and VRML and other documents.
References
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