X3D usage today and in future

R

RolfK

Dear ALL,

I would like to get some feeling on the future of X3D.
The standard is defined, I could also find some plugin or stand alone render software.
But there seems to be not much activity in any user group.
Is there still a development ?
What is the status ?
And how about the acceptance ?

Any comment on this is welcome.

Thanks a lot

RolfK
 
B

BGB

Dear ALL,

I would like to get some feeling on the future of X3D.
The standard is defined, I could also find some plugin or stand alone render software.
But there seems to be not much activity in any user group.
Is there still a development ?
What is the status ?
And how about the acceptance ?

Any comment on this is welcome.

I think:
not really caught on;
not really likely to catch on.

it doesn't really have a strong use-case on its own, and isn't really
all that sensibly designed for other use-cases (such as gaming, *1), ...

so, in some ways, it is a hard sell.

*1: typically, gaming uses lots of semi-independent files, where each
file contains a specific type of information, and only that information.
it is then all tied together via game-logic and in cooperation with the
game-engine. X3D, however, tries to tangle it all together, and puts
things together in ways that don't really make much sense for gaming.


basically, it is like standards for sake of standards.
resources are pushed into a standard to try to make it go somewhere, but
it doesn't really do so if no one really sees a good reason to use it.

this sort of thing isn't entirely uncommon though.
 
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The standard is simply something that the 3DWeb Consortium established just so people have a working effect for most current browsers. We'll never get totally away from browser plug-ins, or stand alone clients. There are still people working with the older VRML2/VRML97 standard as well. I'm seeing lots of effort being pushed at an opensim standard. My personal preference is X3D. But as you point out, not much activity is happening in it. My own recommendation is to continue to work with X3D, but be aware that you're working in a niche that not everyone adheres to. So your work is limited to followers of that standard.
 

GLG

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Some of the activity is on mailing lists. Check web3D.org for x3d-public. Google returned 2,600,000 hits, so I guess most questions have already been answered. The standards are very mature, but continued efforts are being made for improvements. There is no question about X3D's acceptance. It is widely in use in various settings for training, research and many other 'serious' applications that are not necessarily on the Web. The military and NASA are using it for instances, so you can't go very wrong. As far as acceptance over the Internet, there is not an issue with X3D itself, but rather an issue with general acceptance of 3D. With the proliferation of game consoles, it made more sense for a long time to play games that way instead of downloading large quantity of content with limited bandwidth. Plus, consoles are more apt at processing and delivering content rapidly for faster user experience than most people's work computers. However, you can find that X3D will be better suited for MMOG and virtual worlds than anything else out there, especially when very large numbers of users begin to interact. What is really missing is the killer app, and this has little to do with the language or format itself. You can build X3D worlds with as many "semi-independent" files or modules as you want, and use externproto's together with Javascript to glue it all together. This relates more to developers' implementation than anything else. In the end, if you want to do 3D on the Internet, you do not have much choice but go with the standards, especially if you want to do something that is highly interactive. Companies that don't, are essentially building closed systems that can in the end become their demise when integration and convergence begin to occur. An exception to that could be HTML5 with WebGL and Javascript, but that can be excruciatingly slow, it is in its infancy, and not supported with IE, so mostly good for limited applications. Compared to X3D, which is much faster and light-years ahead, I think it's a no brainer, but that always depends of what you want to accomplish. Hope this helps. Cheers,
 

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