[X3D-Public] Fwd: Re: [X3D] X3D HTML5meetingdiscussions:Declarative 3D interest group at W3C

[Philipp Slusallek]

Hi,

Am 03.01.2011 23:45, schrieb GLG:
> My last question is on the subject of physics. That has
> barely been touched. I was wondering if some thought was
> giving to it. Basic stuff at first like collision and
> gravity.

Forgot to comment on this explicitly (but I did mention it before). Two
bachelor students have done a prototype integration of the Bullet engine
with XML3D that is now running a nice small physics game (just took them
2 days). The really nice part of this is that we added physics
completely orthogonally to XML3D. Just as with the optical appearance
properties in form of a shader, we created the same with respect to
physical properties (mass density, friction etc).

After adding Bullet as a browser extension together with a bit of glue
code, we now have a separate Physics Renderer that scans and monitors
the DOM (respectively our shadow scene graph behind it) for any objects
with physics properties. They are then handed over to Bullet, which does
the physics simulation. Any resulting effects are send back to the DOM
to animate the objects, etc.

Having physics as a plugin was pragmatic at that point and may not be
the best option. One could argue that it should really be running within
the browser too. One could also think about connecting to it WebSockets
but which may be too slow. Finally, maybe someone comes up with a JS
implementation of Bullet :-).


	Philipp