The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) held their annual Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee (TPAC) meeting in Santa Clara California from 31 Oct through 4 November. During this important week-long event, the Declarative 3D (DEC3D) Community Group (http://www.w3.org/community/declarative3d) of the W3C conducted two meetings on the topic of collecting use cases and building requirements for natively embedding 3D scenes in a web browser.

The primary outreach meeting centered on an overview presentation and demonstrations by co-chairs Johannes Behr (Fraunhofer, Web3D Consortium) and Kristian Sons  (DFKI).  Both of their teams have shown example ways to expand the capabilities of web browsers to natively display 3D scenes. A crucial emphasis is aligning 3D graphics with HTML5 in order to achieve the broadest possible adoption.  The prototype demonstrations of X3DOM (http://www.x3dom.org - pronounced "X-Freedom) and XML3D (http://www.xml3d.org) were quite compelling.  Group participants and attendees agreed that the time is right to define broad use cases and derive corresponding requirements from the larger W3C community.

Participants expect that this ongoing Declarative 3D Community Group effort will strive to become a full-fledged W3C Working Group within the year. The themes and challenges involved with Web-based 3D graphics are quite familiar to X3D authors and implementers, so this work is very appropriate. The Web3D Consortium and X3D Working Group will continue contributing to the Declarative 3D community group in its efforts to broaden 3D graphics on the Web.