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

[Chris Marrin]

On Jan 5, 2011, at 3:48 AM, Johannes Behr wrote:

> Hi,
> 
>>> 
>>> One of the reasons why we started the XG is, because we think that the HTML integration is the main focus point. It's not about ratifying X3D spec, X3DOM or XML3D. I think we have an excellent starting point with two approaches (XML3D and X3DOM), WebGL prototypes, native implementations in Chrome and Firefox and several plugin implementations. Thus we have some lessons learned. Now it's time to identify the requirements and based on that, we have to find an optimal solution for the Web. That's why we a looking for industry backup (probably another flaw of X3D) for our initiative and I think we are on a good way. So one topic will be to find a good technical solution, the other to show use-cases for declarative applications and to demonstrate the industry interest.
>> 
>> We did WebGL in Khronos because we wanted to take advantage of the expertise of the Khronos participants. I think you have good expertise in 3D declarative forms already, but I would recommend you stay close to other W3C efforts to be able to draw on their more general web expertise as well. As a WebKit developer, I would also recommend you pull a WebKit tree and understand it. We already have a cross-platform 3D rendering API (GraphicsContext3D).
> 
> This is very interesting but I could find any further documention (just the headers).
> Is there already a Scene-Graph API ontop of this GrphicsContext?
> Does the OSX-Preview tool utilize this interface while rendering a collada file?

Preview uses it's own, Apple specific, rendering engine for Collada. I did not mean to imply we had any 3D scene graph in WebKit. GraphicsContext3D is simply a 3D rendering API, used by WebGL, Google's 3D compositor and some new 2D acceleration work that Google is doing. The nice thing about it is that it is very close to the WebGL (and there OpenGL ES) API, but runs on top of various OpenGL implementations and D3D via ANGLE.

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~Chris
chris at marrin.com