instantreality 1.0

The video shown below was produced at Ernani Silva Bruno Primary School, in São Paulo, August, 2012. It shows two moments of an after school interactive media literacy project that has been carried out under the supervision of Jorge Franco.

The project’s goal is to stimulate students from the 4th grade level enhancing technical and cognitive skills as well as learning and applying science concepts from the curriculum through using digital media. Among other activities, the students have been editing X3DOM files. Through that it is expected they learn basics of computer graphics, develop spatial thinking and math skills related to coordinate systems and how to place virtual objects, and enhance reading and writing abilities which are experienced while they are programming and commenting X3D and HTML code.

This year’s Web3D conference, which was held in cooperation with ACM Siggraph, has shown that the most common development platforms in 3D Web research are of course WebGL and – most interestingly – X3DOM. Please check out the whole technical program if you like to learn more. A few impressions showing the conference’s opening session (top photo) as well as a panel session (bottom) can be seen below.

The Web3D 2012 conference’s organizing team. From left to right: general chair Christophe Mouton (EDF, France), program chair (and X3DOM core developer) Yvonne Jung (Fraunhofer IGD, Germany), general chair Jorge Posada (Vicomtech, Spain), and program chair Marcio Cabral (University of Sao Paulo, Brazil).

Panel Session: 3D and the Web. Sitting in front, from left to right: Don Brutzman (NPS), Samuel Parfouru (EDF), Neil Trevett (Khronos Group and NVidia), Kenneth Russell (Google and WebGL Working Group Chair), Marius Preda (MPEG ARAF), Johannes Behr (Fraunhofer IGD), and Alain Chesnais (TrendSpottr and former President ACM), who chaired the panel).

Come meet the developer team at the exhibition floor of Siggraph 2012 in Los Angeles in booth #234! We brought some new Kinect goodies with us and will show a fusion of InstantReality as a service for out-of-core rendering with X3DOM. It’ll blow your mind! For those who can’t wait to see it, here is a 14.5 million triangle model paged to an iPad. In addition we will present the latest features of X3DOM and general X3D developments at the following BOFs:

• X3DOM a Declarative 3D Solution, Wednesday 10 AM – 11 AM
• WebGL, Wednesday 4 PM – 5 PM

The paper acceptance notifications for Web3D 2012 are already out and the online conference registration is now open:
http://www.xpressreg.net/register/SIGG082/start.asp
Please note that there are special rates for ACM members and that early bird registration is until 18 June 2012.

The conference is co-located with SIGGRAPH 2012 and will take place on August 04-05, 2012, in Los Angeles, CA, USA.
The X3DOM team will be at Web3D with several presentations. So, if you’re around, it’s a great opportunity for discussions. Hope to see you there…

On April, 17th, some members of the X3DOM team were at the WWW2012 Workshop “Declarative 3D for the Web Architecture” (Dec3D2012) in Lyon, France. There, we presented X3DOM and discussed about an integration of interactive 3D graphics capabilities into the W3C Web technology stack together with researchers from the Web community. If you are also interested in evolving the idea of declarative 3D in the Web, feel free to join our Community Group: http://www.w3.org/community/declarative3d/

Johannes Behr (Fraunhofer IGD), who was part of the workshop's organizing team (together with Kristian Sons, DFKI, who is sitting to the left), presents the community group's goals.

The 17th ACM International Web3D Conference will address a wide range of research topics related to Web-based 3D graphics (like X3D/ X3DOM/ Dec3D). The Conference will be held in Los Angeles in conjunction with SIGGRAPH 2012 on August 4-5, 2012.

The full call for papers is at http://web3d2012.org/submission.html
Extended paper/poster submission deadline: April 16th, 2012

We have updated our browser check page. You will now be presented with more detailed help an further instructions of how to update in case your browser does not support X3DOM.

We have an official spot at the Software Cluster booth (Hall 26, booth F30) and demo the latest x3dom.org and instantreality.org features!

Come by to see some interesting demos, talk to the developers and chat about idea, design and implementation issues you have. Look out for the white multi-touch table!

We are happy to announce two related scientific conferences, which are coming up and where members of the X3DOM team are directly involved as part of the organizing team: the Dec3D 2012 Workshop  in conjunction with WWW2012 in April located in Lyon, France, and the 17th International Web3D 2012 conference that is co-located with ACM Siggraph 2012 and held in Los Angeles, USA.

Both conferences include a ‘call for papers’ for related scientific material:

• CfP: Dec3D 2012 Workshop. Paper Deadline: 22/02/2012 (EXTENDED workshop deadline is on 29/02/2012)
• CfP: Web3D 2012 Conference. Paper Deadline: 03/04/2012

Please consider contributing a paper, if you use or extend X3DOM in some kind of scientific project or work on related topics (e.g., declarative 3D approaches or WebGL-based rendering).

Currently Internet Explorer does not sport a native WebGL implementation. This means X3DOM has to fallback to the Flash Player in order to render 3D content. However, there is a way around this: Chrome Frame. The plugin developed by Google replaces the default rendering engine of Internet Explorer with Google Chrome. What you get is the User Interface of Internet Explorer and the rendering capabilities of  Google Chrome – including a native WebGL implementation.

As an IE user, we recommend you install the Chrome Frame plugin to experience the full power of X3DOM. As a developer, you can target the Chrome Frame rendering engine, by placing the following meta tag in your HTML head section:

    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1" />

Alternatively, if you do not want to edit all your HTML files for this, you can set a HTTP header on your server to trigger Chrome Frame. More info can be found here:

• Chrome Frame developer guide
• X3DOM documentation

Our X3DOM examples already use that technique to enable Chrome Frame if you have it installed.

Here’s a introduction of Chrome Frame by Google: