To the X3D early-adopter community

About the Web3D Consortium

The Web3D Consortium is an industry funded non-profit organization that supports a collaborative environment to develop and advance open standards, royalty free 3D interchange format based on XML, along with tools to represent and communicate 3D scenes and objects between diverse authoring and presentation hardware and software on the web, distributed networks and mobile devices. More information is available at About the Web3D Consortium.

As 3D becomes more and more accessible to end users, Web3D Consortium envisions the synthesis of 2D with 3D immersive worlds. As we at the Web3D Consortium say “X3D is the best kept secret”. Your company may also want to explore the benefits of joining the Web3D Consortium.

Strengths and Benefits of X3D

1. X3D is a royalty-free open standard for real-time 3D graphics communication on the Web.
2. X3D is an interchange format for many 3D graphics technologies with well-defined run-time behavior (interactive and immersive).
3. Many aspects of X3D design closely match the architecture of HTML and other XML languages.
4. X3D scenes can be linked via Anchor elements or grown via embedded Inline elements.
5. X3D scene authoring does not require programming expertise and can be accomplished by Web authors.
6. X3D is designed for performance, device independence, user interactivity and internationalization (I18N).
7. Web3D working groups are responsive, continuing to produce X3D Specification updates every 2-3 years.
8. X3D has a long and stable evolution that originated with the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML97).
9. X3D maintains backwards compatibility while steadily adding new cutting-edge industry capabilities.
10. X3D is well supported by many browser plugins, players, authoring tools and conversion tools.
11. X3D implementations are widely available as either commercial products or open source.
12. Quality assurance (QA) for X3D scenes includes DTD, XML Schema and Schematron validation.
13. Conformance suites and numerous example scenes are available to test proper software compliance.

Interoperability and Deployment of X3D

X3D enables the communication of real-time 3D across applications, networks, and XML web services. There are several X3D compliant, open-source and commercial X3D-players with high performance/multi-platform render-engines. Consistent browser installation and operations, making it easy for end users to see X3D as a stable ISO standard with interoperable user interfaces and navigation. Player support: Windows, MacOSX, Linux, and Solaris. Player support for X3D components.

X3D Scenarios and Case Studies

X3D has a strong presence internationally and throughout many different industries. From healthcare science to oil exploration, X3D is being deployed for many important as well diverse uses. Examples

Current Initiatives

Proposed X3D integration with HTML5

X3D for Medical Imaging a DICOM standard

X3D for the Mobile Platfrom

X3D for Augmented Reality

X3D Tools and Resources

There are many tools listed on our X3D Resources page

X3D Books

For learning X3D you might find that our book X3D for Web Authors with accompanying slidesets, examples and videos is helpful.

X3D Questions

Our X3D public mailing list is a good place to ask questions.

As a developer, what kind of open source sample code is available for developing X3D Content?

As a developer, what kind of open source sample code is available for parsing and manipulating X3D files?

What is X3D's asset pipeline?

What features does X3D support?