[X3D-Public] Fwd: Re: [X3D] X3D HTML5 meeting discussions: Declarative 3D interest group at W3C

[Chris Marrin]

On Dec 23, 2010, at 1:18 PM, John Carlson wrote:

> I'm describing the model declaratively -- as a function (I've already described it procedurally as a mesh in the past with X3D and ECMAScript--and other technologies--including my hand written function based raytracer)--There are things I've left out like the ranges of phi and theta that are used...this is important when C and D are non-integer.  I am trying to take my model, and inject it into an environment or virtual world (say I inject it through a URL that returns the MathML)--and in that virtual world, assign stylesheet parameters (say I want to make the model reflective or refractive--or other materials).  The equation is in spherical coordinates (this is the 3D part).  I have had people use this equation in FVRML with fixed A, B, C and D (they've even done it as a function of time as well I think).  Ideally, I'd like to drag and drop this animation model (or the URL) into a world, assign style, and render and publish.  And I want this done on Mac OS X.
> 
> Obviously, I could write all the infrastructure/framework myself--I'm more of an application programmer than a framework or infrastructure programmer.
> 
> Here would be an example of the final result (minus the animation): http://coderextreme.net/roses/trans9.jpg  This was done with NVIDIA HDR code on Windows plus code which generated a mesh which I provided.  I don't have an NVIDIA card right now. I have tried the JOGL version of the HDR code, and it doesn't really have any reflectiivity or refraction, that I can tell.  Perhaps I should port the HDR code to WebGL.  I don't know the capabilities of WebGL, so I couldn't tell you if I could get the same results.
> 
> I'd like to do this in web browser so it's easily distributed...
> 
> Do you want more definition?

I don't want to try to steer the conversation. I'm just an interested observer. I can say that, in my experience your example, while interesting and compelling, is too domain specific for a general purpose declarative form. The good news is that JavaScript is more than up to the task of transforming your high level constructs into renderable entities. How you feed those constructs into JS is up to you. You can create your own form with Microformats. Or you could use a custom namespace with JavaScript processing like X3DOM. HTML 5 makes it possible to solve domain specific problems declaratively without having to resort to custom browsers or plugins.

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~Chris
chris at marrin.com