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<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;color:#1F497D'>Excellent
overview John. I've looked at the Castle Game Engine as you suggested. But
Unreal is what's really starting get my attention, partly due to the fact
that its use of C++ gives it a lot of power, with full access to source code
extending to the engine's subsystems. It's ultimately not free, but if trying
to follow the money, it's at least as good as anything. And when used to create
videos it is actually royalty free, as only interactive applications carry
royalties. I've been an avid Blender user for a number of years, and that will
always have its place, but getting from that to Unreal feels like getting into
a brand new luxury car. Like 'iam here', I also believe that graphics quality
is very important. So, I'd be looking for a possible symbiosis, augmentation,
or outright replacement of FBX with X3D in Unreal or something similar, in
order to turn games into work to use your terminology. I call it the gamification
of work, since that has always been the direction of my efforts and, to me, the
ultimate outcome. Whether a "game" is streamed from a server or not,
that involves final rendering on a display device. The internal operations
should essentially remain largely the same. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;color:#1F497D'>GL<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Simplified Arabic Fixed";
color:#1F497D'>________________________________________________________<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Simplified Arabic Fixed";
color:#1F497D'>* * * Interactive Multimedia - Internet Management * * *<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'> </span><span
style='font-family:"Simplified Arabic Fixed";color:#1F497D'> * *</span><span
style='color:#1F497D'> </span><span style='font-family:"Simplified Arabic Fixed";
color:#1F497D'> Virtual Reality -- Application Programming</span><span
style='color:#1F497D'> </span><span style='font-family:"Simplified Arabic Fixed";
color:#1F497D'> * *<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'> </span><span
style='font-family:"Simplified Arabic Fixed";color:#1F497D'> *</span><span
style='color:#1F497D'> </span><span style='font-family:"Simplified Arabic Fixed";
color:#1F497D'> 3D Net Productions</span><span style='color:#1F497D'> </span><span
style='font-family:"Simplified Arabic Fixed";color:#1F497D'>
3dnetproductions.com</span><span style='color:#1F497D'> </span><span
style='font-family:"Simplified Arabic Fixed";color:#1F497D'> *<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>From:</span></b><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> x3d-public
[mailto:x3d-public-bounces@web3d.org] <b>On Behalf Of </b>John Carlson<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Sunday, April 28, 2019 11:18 AM<br>
<b>To:</b> iam here; X3D Graphics public mailing list<br>
<b>Subject:</b> Re: [x3d-public] Is there even a *case* for client-side 3D at
all??<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
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<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>We’ve seen google 3D go flash-in-pan before. We’ve
seen Sun Microsystems Wonderland demise at the hands of oracle. 3D
is not commercially supportable unless you’re getting big bucks selling an
authoring system (a CLIENT system, CAD, imaging, or geo), consoles (a CLIENT)
or are selling *<b>expensive</b>* games (more CLIENTs). People don’t make
money selling 3D servers, unless they also sell software, ads, blogs, sex, or
product [Amazon (product+NetFlix client), Facebook (games, headset),
Google(ads)]. My server costs $120 per year, and I have a max of say, 2
users on my system at a time, and Digital Ocean is probably half of that.
Amazon for 1 months for an idling system is like $50. That doesn’t
last long for the small indie guy. It’s much cheaper and faster to do peer-to-peer
I’d imagine for multiple user games (choose best connected/powerful client as
the main server). Single user games have no use for a server except for updates
and uploading and viewing score data (low bandwidth activities), and displaying
ads. I am looking at moving my content to gists and blogs, so I don’t
have to host it any more. Look at all the CLIENTs Netflix supports B’god.
If NetFlix got into the game selling business with Roku or Apple TV, they would
be a force, but NetFlix wants to be on all gaming consoles, not competing with
them. So the best bet to knock over X3D is Adobe, frankly. People have
made advances to integrate X3D into Acrobat, but so far all offers have been
rejected. I think this may be due to John Warnock’s creation of a 3D language
before PostScript. None of Adobe’s forays have succeeded either (and they
are in the archiving business big time. That means your code has to last
*<b>forever</b>*, through a *<b>nuclear</b>* attack, etc.). That’s right folks
there have been 3D languages and APIs and standards before OpenGL/VRML/X3D
(GKS, PHIGS) That’s ancient history. VRML was original developed as
OpenInventor, a web-enabled layer on top of OpenGL by SiliconGraphics, probably
the only two things that make it’s out of SGI’s demise (CosmoCode too?). The
real standards in this arena, and where the battle is is WebGL/OpenGL, probably
Vulkan (next OpenGL from AMD/Khronos), CUDA (Nvidia) and Metal (Apple) have
absolute control of the mobile market (with Direct* on Xbox and Windows
systems). I don’t know what Sony is using on the PS4. Nor Nintendo.
None of the shading languages are declarative or scenegraph oriented, (higher
level than the shading languages), [ shading languages deal with
matrices, textures, colors and vertices/polygons—NOT shapes and hierarchical
structure suited for animation, except through polygons ] to my knowledge,
which X3D is. Our competitors are things like Collada (Sony), FBX (AutoDesk),
PlayCanvas (independent), Three.js (independent), Babylon.js (Microsoft), XSeen
(Leonard Daly and friends), A-Frame (Mozilla) and XML3D (independent). In other
words, X3D IS NOT IN THE GAMING BUSINESS! X3D/VRML can be primarily seen
as the output from animation tools and tools like Maya, Blender, Jupyter
notebook, MatLab and octave. NOT A GAME! We are REALLY into
things like CAD (AutoCAD and PTC have the market share) Geo (ESRI has the
market share, I think) Medicine (HL7 is big time here, followed by FHIR, which
includes X3D) Military Simulations (DIS) and other types of visualization
(and one or two games). In other words, we are REALLY into developing WORK
standards, NOT GAMES.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Out of those which have you heard of? Which of
them offer a declarative interface like HTML? Now you know why X3D/VRML is on top
of the (rather small) heap it’s on top of. COLLADA currently has the
glTF2 market, but we’re moving glTF2 into X3D. You can translate FBX to
PlayCanvas’ formats, but then they aren’t FBX ultimately<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>The main *<b>work-related</b>* web graphics are glTF (and it’s
pal COLLADA on the server), think of this at a lower level than X3D, closer to
webGL, we can incorporate it. Three.js, the most popular 3D JS framework, I
think, has its own external format. We have limited
interoperability with it, but see three-x3d-loader. A-Frame (incorporates glTF
and Three.js I think) is next. It has growing number of tags. Note
that all of these use WebGL, so the shading language competition is pretty much
moot on the web. Note X3D supports any shading language it’s host browser
does, but the shading language may not be portable across all browsers (which
is why there’s a push to move the shading language out of X3D).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Notice out of all of these, AutoCAD, PTC, ESRI, and and
FHIR/HL7 are market, industry-standard leaders for *<b>work</b>* 3D
content. Google is being a fly in the ointment for those (google earth,
google maps, etc., for the consumer, not professionals, SketchPad?), offering
google docs like office duplicates for groups, to distract the leaders from the
real market, ads and potentially for google, AI. A typical one console ad
network shop makes $100,000 per month on ads. There are ad markets where
people compete to sell ads. X3D is a *<b>work</b>* related format.
Not an ad related format. I think Web3D would start cheering very loudly
if Microsoft took notice of X3D/VRML, Microsoft pretty much defines the work
world on computers. We could use a little embracing and extending (XML is the
Extensible Markup Language, don’tcha know. But I don’t think Microsoft is
going to take on AutoCAD, PTC or Adobe with X3D any time soon, they’re too busy
with HoloLens, Games and Direct* and fighting Sony to deal with something that
they frankly can’t make money on except for Medical purposes (think of running
on all those Windows XP systems in the hospital and doctor’s offices,
eek). EDI has not been very popular since the web, and perhaps HL7 sees
this as an opportunity to jump on web tech (eek).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b>I would encourage X3D/VRML to continue to court Adobe, by
creating a stack-based encoding (by incorporating tags as stack commands or
dictionaries, potentially with a new ANTLR grammar or revised VRML), like PDF
and PostScript. If we had Adobe on our side creating tools for a
stack-based standards based encoding, we could compete. Also, we would integrate
with the image/text/curve in PDF and PostScript with
(movie)texture/hypertext/shape in X3D.<o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><o:p> </o:p></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>If you haven’t noticed it, all but heavy AI processing has
moved to desktops and mobiles, with AngularJS, YouTube, Vue and React taking up
1 or 2 CPUs. That leaves 4-6 CPUs plus the GPU free to do 3D.
Meanwhile Google and Microsoft are trying to invent new things to do with their
AI GPU cloud farms which never really materialized on the market (yet). Thus
copy OnLive and Sony. The only reason I can see for Google to enter this
market is to distract MS from ads and the web, where MS has recently made a
coup with the GitHub procurement. I can see google competing with Nvidia
however. Maybe that’s the intent, and MS is backing Nvidia up. Hmm.
My guess is google is building a humungous AI farm disguised as a games farm
(and they need a place to use their new TPUs). They’re going to train a
new cadre of google employees to challenge Alpha Go and Alpha Zero.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>If you’re looking for the Game (application creating)
competition for X3D (not the animation competition), there’s PlayCanvas, Unity
and Unreal. That’s pretty much it, except for niche markets. X3D is
very limited in the games market, as we’ve never really targeted it. However,
there’s a Unity browser for X3D (yay!) and Castle Game Engine (yay!)
check them out!<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>The network is still the primary bottleneck for graphics.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>If there was a better way to compress video (I suggest X3D 5
or something, X3D is already part of the MPEG standard), then I could see
server gaming coming to fruition.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Here’s a company , OnLive that went belly up selling cloud
gaming (does no one remember?), worked similar to NetFlix:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOlgpK9ME8g">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOlgpK9ME8g</a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Obviously, Google is looking for more ad revenue and to
destroy MS and Sony, and MS is trying to block them from eating into Xbox
revenues. I’m surprised Sony isn’t suing both of them into the ground.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>I get 5Mb/second here in Iowa. I guess that’s not fast
enough! They should probably wait for the rollout of 5G and sell to handheld
cellphone devices. And 5G will reach my town when? We can’t even get cell
coverage at the elementary school parking lot barely.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>I am also wondering what Stadia and xCloud platforms will
really be used for? NSFW? Note that X3D supports the up and coming
international standard for Humanoid Animation (grin). Now you see our
strategy? We’re doing a end-run-around of all the porn video and image
sites and Second Life to provide standard and photographed, scanned, imaged,
animated human avatars to doctors who have the money to shell out for fancy HP
and Dell workstations (CLIENTs) in their offices and at home.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Work and entertainment, not games. Remember that iam
here. We want the oculus-web users ultimately I would say. So put
your pretty penny on React and X3D working well together, or React3D. No one is
going to do a much with A-Frame is my prediction. High end social users will
remain in walled gardens like Facebook, High Fidelity and Second Life—they give
you the whole package, unfortunately, the last two are primarily C# I believe
(no 3D format to compete with). So what to look for is 3D developments
from Facebook on their website. That’s the future of 3D on the web, sadly.
We’ll all be datamined by the number of human avatars we’ve tried on in a
month.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>I suggest we get an X3DOM/X_ITE document on this website,
really quickly, glTF is already up: <a
href="https://dwqdaiwenqi.github.io/react-3d-viewer/site/#/GLTF"><strong><span
style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:windowtext;text-decoration:
none'>https://dwqdaiwenqi.github.io/react-3d-viewer/site/#/GLTF</span></strong></a>
if we want to be part of react3d and the future of the 3D web. LOL<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>In other words, Google will serve up video, not 3D or VR
(too much video).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>I don’t think that X3D taxes the graphics card too much
unless you open 4-5 canvases at a time, all with animation. You can
probably tweak a libraries WebGL code to reduce polygons if necessary.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>And please tell me why I should upload my businesses data to
google just to be shown in stadia?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Have you ever worked in a business? Some people don’t
want to upload their critical business data to the cloud.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Does anyone have a review of USD format from Pixar and Apple
and whether it will be a FBX killer?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>I believe X3D can be done on the server as well, the same
way you would do a game on the server.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>John “I use High Fidelity! You use Facebook?
Ew!” Carlson<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Sent from <a
href="https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986">Mail</a> for Windows 10<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<div style='border:none;border-top:solid #E1E1E1 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'>
<p class=MsoNormal><b>From: </b><a href="mailto:iamhereintheworld@gmail.com">iam
here</a><br>
<b>Sent: </b>Saturday, April 27, 2019 12:06 PM<br>
<b>To: </b><a href="mailto:x3d-public@web3d.org">X3D Graphics public mailing
list</a><br>
<b>Subject: </b>[x3d-public] Is there even a *case* for client-side 3D at all??<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
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<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>Hi,<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>I've posted to this list before, I'm a newbie to X3D and
have been (off and on) trying to get to grips with it. However, as yall may be
familiar with, Google has announced the upcoming launch of their streaming
gaming service, Stadia, while MS has something called xCloud. So, what I'm
wondering about is, after the advent of things like this, with God knows how
much power available on the server-side, *is there even a case* for things like
X3D, where the number crunching will be done on the CLIENT??<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>It all boils down to how many folks have high-end horsepower
in their homes, and how many do not, and I can safely say that here, in my
country, there are HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of people who don't have say, a
spanking Nvidia 2080 on their tables at home! But I don't have hard data on the
overall situation, the *worldwide* scenario.... (btw, *data* here is dirt
cheap, in case anyone wondered.)<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
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<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
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<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>What's the consensus *here*, on this list? I have great
respect for what you guys *DID* with X3D, but....if there's no case for
actually *using* it because it gets obsoleted by the likes of Stadia,
then....it'll be a sad day, I guess. Of course we don't know what Google's
*pricing* will be, but....that's hardly a lifeline. Also, these are not the only
2 there are - check something like *this*: <a href="http://www.liquidsky.com">www.liquidsky.com</a>
, which looks pretty nice.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
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<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
</div>
</div>
<p class=MsoNormal>So - is X3D doomed? :(<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
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