Purpose

Extensible 3D (X3D) is a system for describing interactive 3D objects and worlds as defined in ISO/IEC 19775. This part of ISO/IEC 19776 specifies the encoding of the functionality defined in ISO/IEC 19775 using the technique used by ISO/IEC 14772-1 (VRML).

As defined in ISO/IEC 19775-1 X3D Architecture, Extensible 3D (X3D) is a software standard for defining interactive web- and broadcast-based 3D content integrated with multimedia. X3D is intended for use on a variety of hardware devices and in a broad range of application areas such as engineering and scientific visualization, multimedia presentations, entertainment and educational titles, web pages, and shared virtual worlds. X3D is also intended to be a universal interchange format for integrated 3D graphics and multimedia. X3D is the successor to the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), the original ISO standard for web-based 3D graphics (ISO/IEC 14772-1 Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML97)). X3D improves upon VRML with new features, advanced application programmer interfaces, additional data encoding formats, stricter conformance, and a componentized architecture that allows for a modular approach to supporting the standard.