[x3d-public] Showcase: 3D maps showing sea level change using X3D/X3DOM

[Magnus Zeisig]

I just wanted to say thank you to the community and developers for providing a great, quick and simple tool to get 3D scenes done and published. It took me a week of spare time from completing the first "Hello, X3DOM!" tutorial to having a set of 370 coastal areas around the world in interactive 3D on the web, most of that time required to massage geodata from GEBCO and GeoNames into proper format: http://sealevelrise.se/en/earth_3d1/

At least initially looking more for a quick tool to get the job done than to really learn all the nuts and bolts of X3D and X3DOM, I've probably made a lot of beginners' mistakes, and I'm sure I'll revisit and improve the project as I learn more, but for now, it's up, working and looking good. Once more, thank you!

As a background, I'm not all new to 3D. I wrote my first 2-pass (light and shadow) 3D renderer back in 1981, in BASIC on a micro-computer with a 2.2 MHz 8 bit Z80-processor and 32 KB RAM, taking 2 weeks to render a 332 face mesh model (608 tris) in high resolution (2304x1152 px). In 1995-1996, I created my first 3D scenes on the web using VRML, and later worked with software like RayDream Studio, POV-Ray, Carrara and Poser. 2007-2008 I went into virtual worlds like Second Life and OpenSimulator, and contributed some code to OpenSimulator. Lately, I've created some 3D web content using WebGL and ThreeJS, and contributed some to the ThreeJS documentation.

I left VRML when the existing viewers went defunct on Macintosh in the late 1990's, leaving it without a properly functioning viewer for a while, and since I didn't hear much about VRML afterwards, I assumed it more or less dead. I'm happy to see I was wrong and that its offspring X3D is still alive and kicking. While e.g. ThreeJS has its charm for some projects, it's overkill for others, and at least for this project, X3D/X3DOM definitely was a smoother choice.