Johannes introduced the project and showed what we achieved over the last 12 month at the webgl cam#2. The video is now online. The slide set includes some new material including this overview which relates x3dom to svg, canvas and webgl.

SVG, canvas, WebGL and X3DOM relation

The latest Firefox and Chrome beta builds support now webGL natively without any further effort. You just download and install Firfox4 beta7 or Chorme9 beta-channel and get webgl for free. No extra about:config or command-line settings needed.

We finally added the missing standard navigation modes: We support now examine, walk, fly and lookat. You are free to activate those (with e.g. <navigationInfo type=’walk’ ..>) or just write your own application-speicifc navigation-code.  There is a small example which can be used to test the different modes.

The modes use the new faster picking code in the webgl implementation and should perform well for larger worlds.

We now support (almost) all mouse and keyboard events directly on the x3d element. This allows the application developer to build own forms of navigation or mix 2D and 3D references freely. There is a new application prototype which utilizes those events to create a standard carousel menu.

carousel menu example

These events are not just useful to build own navigation types but great for anything that needs pixels without a clear reference to a specific object (e.g. context menu). If you need an object reference you could use those events on the 3D-elements (e.g. group or shape) to get a standard MouseEvent which provides pixels and additional 3d properties (e.g. worldX, worldY,worldZ).