[x3d-public] New Image and Video Sphere X3D examples +

[John Carlson]

Hi Nicholas, can you provide a video capture viewable on Google Drive?
I’ve applied a MovieTexture to a Sphere before, but I acknowledge it might
work better as an IndexedFaceSet.

Stepping inside the Sphere offers a new way to view X3D movies similar to a
360 degree movie, but perhaps it’s 360x360 degrees sphered (not squared,
lol)?

John

On Wed, Mar 25, 2026 at 2:43 PM Don Brutzman via x3d-public <
x3d-public at web3d.org> wrote:

> Wow, looks great!  Your team's sustained effort on these capabilities is
> most impressive.
>
> Questions on VideoSphere please:
>
>    - Inspecting the source .x3d files, it looks like the VideoSphere
>    pattern applies prepared MovieTexture and IndexedFaceSet nodes without
>    creation of any new X3D node.
>    - Were there any non-trivial additions to X3DOM source?  i.e. will
>    other browsers need further work to support?
>    - Do you expect there might be potential benefit to someday defining a
>    new X3D node in order to encourage adoption?  The X3D specification doesn't
>    distinguish between 360-degree video and other video formats.
>       - Potential use case:  VideoSphere bubbles within a larger scene
>       that permit close-up inspection from certain vantage points.  Such bubbles
>       might use TwoSidedMaterial to be semitransparent (or other Switch
>       techniques to be hidden) within the larger scene.
>       - interesting related capabiltity:  MatterPort, "Scanned-on-Demand
>       3D Models | Quick-Turn 3D Virtual Tours"
>       - https://go.matterport.com/Capture-Service.html
>    - Is the blue car going the wrong direction on a one-way street?
>    autonomous driver, presumably...   🥴
>
> Suggestions regarding MetaverseBookmark: to encourage further
> experimentation and adoption, it would be good to
>
>    - build an example template in X3D using MetadataSet
>    - build a corresponding prototype for the same data structures,
>    potentially adding self-validation (via Script) and external validation (by
>    various tools),
>    - add these to X3D Examples Archive
>
> Standing ovation, again thanks for sharing these significant updates.
>
> all the best, Don
> --
> X3D Graphics, Maritime Robotics, Distributed Simulation
> Relative Motion Consulting  https://RelativeMotion.info
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 25, 2026 at 11:55 AM Polys, Nicholas via x3d-public <
> x3d-public at web3d.org> wrote:
>
>> Hello all~
>>
>> I just wanted to share that I have posted the X3DOM
>> VideoSphere pattern and released on github (MIT license):
>>  npolys/X3DSpheres
>> <https://github.com/npolys/X3DSpheres?tab=readme-ov-file>
>>
>> Thanks to UND and the Web3D Tools 2025 Competition for the inspiration!
>> I will continue to create and share repos with our work! 🙂
>>
>>
>> You may notice also that from our papers last year, we released
>> X3DTest  VT-Visionarium/X3Test <https://github.com/VT-Visionarium/X3Test>
>>
>> Nikhil Narra, Anuj Marisetty, Nicholas Polys, and Ben Sandbrook. 2025.
>> X3Test: A Headless Browser-Based Framework for Automated Performance
>> Benchmarking of X3D/X3DOM Scenes. In Proceedings of the 30th International
>> Conference on 3D Web Technology (Web3D '25). Association for Computing
>> Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–5.
>> https://doi.org/10.1145/3746237.3746315
>>
>>  and a MetaverseBookmark concept
>> VT-Visionarium/MetaverseBookmarks
>> <https://github.com/VT-Visionarium/MetaverseBookmarks>
>>
>> Nikhil Narra, Anuj Marisetty, Nicholas Polys, and Ben Sandbrook. 2025. A
>> Generalized Web3D API for Metaverse Bookmarks. In Proceedings of the 30th
>> International Conference on 3D Web Technology (Web3D '25). Association for
>> Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–8.
>> https://doi.org/10.1145/3746237.3746311
>>
>>
>>
>> All improvements and pulls requests welcome!
>>
>> yours in 4D,
>>
>> n_polys
>>
>> --
>> Nicholas F. Polys, Ph.D.
>>
>> Director of Visual Computing
>> Virginia Tech Research Computing
>>
>> Department Editor: @theSource
>> IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications
>>
>> Affiliate Professor
>> Virginia Tech Department of Computer Science
>> https://people.cs.vt.edu/~npolys/  <https://people.cs.vt.edu/~npolys/>
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