[X3D-Public] XTranormal X3D

Mon Dec 6 16:54:21 PST 2010

If I had twenty million, I would.   You need enough capital that everyone
eats while you get momentum.   Say what you like about location independent
teams, to get it done fast, imaginative and bug free, I want the team all in
the same building 9 to 5x5.  Normal lives but intense at work.  Keeps the
team healthy.   It's expensive, but IME, 50 per cent of success is shared
imagination and it's good to be in the same room when conjuring that if you
want your schedules to hold.

With X3D, both the animation in native form and the mp4 run on the web. 

The chasm or opportunity uncrossed is for the cost of load time, an X3D real
time animation is still richer in palette and interactivity.  And it hosts
the same external media types.   The difference is in composition down to
sequences where the sequences are zero-fault in rendering.   The mp4 may
vary by board but in the practical case set, completely reliable.

If I had to manage the evolution of that, I'd complete the path to the mp4
first; provide a we only guarantee it on this download plugin only later.
and be sure everything is ready to go when 3D is native to the browser
itself.   Compile Flash if you must.   MP4 format is a fixed format.   Save
out to as many of these as you can most particularly, wmv.  

The problem of world building is attempting to create a social network
centered in the world.   People won't invest that much time in getting
status updates, the essential FB message type.   They will consume each
other's media postings.  So before we dive back into the rabbit hole of X3D
Being The Web, be fit in the status updates space.  As I said, a reader that
consumes and renders status updates is easy.  All that will work.

So then you're left with the artist's wing.  Some group builds a lot of
compelling avatars and scenes.   Most of that exists out there for any
company that wants to spec the licensing and technical package deliverables.
Here you don't write standards; you spec/contract the parts you need.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave A [mailto:dave at realmofconcepts.com] 
Sent: Sunday, December 05, 2010 9:47 PM
To: Len Bullard
Cc: 'John Carlson'; 'X3D Graphics public mailing list'
Subject: Re: [X3D-Public] XTranormal X3D

FWIW: Vivaty could have done this, the ideas were certainly on the table and
technology available, but the company went in, well, a different direction.
Too bad.
Well, if you got about 10 million and want to get it done, maybe we can get
the band back together.

Dave A

On 12/5/2010 4:44 PM, Len Bullard wrote: 

Not for us.   It isn't product OR standard but product and standards because
we can do more with both than just one.  The trade off here is business size
by limiting access to the engine files (ie, hook them on an editor and don't
give them an export out) or use the fact of the standard to come up with
companies that don't compete by making all of the system but companies that
make competing pieces, character editor vs character editor, audio editor vs
audio editor.

De facto, that is what exist now.  It's parts polyglot.   In one way that
enables quick evolution.   In another, it fragments the market.  

XTranormal goes around that.   It is a company providing not all of those
parts, but the basic animation concepts in a library of content parts.
They sell scenes, characters, voices, behaviors.    They make them popular
figures so you can put words in their mouths.  Oh the joy of modern
stardom.. :-)

The XTranormals are fun and quick to make, and are not more than ten percent
harder than the average Facebook entry to make.  They only have to replace
the avatar/photo with a character.   A default style set for initialization
does the rest.

The trick with the standard is the author shouldn't see it.   The format and
engine are built into the social network as savvy socially sensitive
renderers.  How many namespaces do you want to exchange is the tough
question here and how many would you have to exchange to exchange the full
range of information in an XTranormal?   How many namespaces make up a
scene?

This really comes down to tool over text.    A script, a one two n actor
scene (eg, one film), voices (the way to get complex here is filtering;
that's ok as long as the basic set that you give away JUST WORKS.  Drag and
drop and type.

The reason to use the standard is the bang by the n of sets you can exchange
determines the utility of each component of a type.  Ie, it's nice if the
script runs in all implementations.   So the competition comes down to who
writes the best composition system.   They win.  So far, XTranormal.  It
kicks out mp4s.

Some think about X3D files for real-time animation.   Very good but also
good for sampling. 

In an animation, that is a set of real time or scheduled access to
sequencers.   In a movie, those are mp4s.  

MP4s are very reusable.   It's a very different editing space because it is
audio, video, image, composites, effects for audio  and video and direct
access to an audio editor.  All but the meshes and mesh engines,  IOW, an
integrated movie mixing suite.  Once rendered down to AV, you can split,
splice cut and otherwise harvest a lot of image sequences.   Once you have
access to the temporal address, it's a dimension above because that enables
the slicing into even more finely reusable sequences to the n of the number
of integratible components.  Remember, audio and video are separable parts.
Punch. Punch. Punch.

Now. it's all very neat but the cannot bottom line happen is this:  for any
number more than one in ten should the editing system fail.   In XTranormal,
some sounds such as the chime corrupt the file.  Since there is no backup
past publication, the entire piece is lost.  Oopsie.

You can't do that.  Content lost is irretrievable even if it can be
recreated from memory.  A Save without backup is a clusterPlucker waiting to
happen.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: x3d-public-bounces at web3d.org [mailto:x3d-public-bounces at web3d.org] On
Behalf Of John Carlson
Sent: Sunday, December 05, 2010 6:03 PM
To: X3D Graphics public mailing list
Subject: Re: [X3D-Public] XTranormal X3D

Isn't "The Sims" good enough for doing 3D Worlds?  Look at what "Spore" does
for avatars.  The trick is that these are applications, not standards.

Check this out this 3D authoring tool (Kinect based) for ideas:
http://vimeo.com/16818988

John

On Dec 3, 2010, at 3:58 PM, Len Bullard wrote:

When will someone do for X3D worlds what XTranormal does for videos?

I worked on HumanML hoping someone would make that happen but it didn't.  It
became too many things to too many people.

Is it really that hard?  XTranormal has approximately 1.6 million projects,
series, all from a simple drag and drop text interface.

It is said the power of HTML is view source, but really, it is text you CAN
type.   XTranormal simplified to the basics and it works.

len

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