X3DOM

Introduction

“X3DOM (pronounced X-Freedom) is an experimental open source framework and runtime to support the ongoing discussion in the Web3D and W3C communities how an integration of HTML5 and declarative 3D content could look like. It tries to fulfill the current HTML5 specification for declarative 3D content and allows including X3D elements as part of any HTML5 DOM tree.” (X3dom.org, retrieved 12:29, 25 August 2010 (UTC)).

The X3DOM (if accepted as specification which seems to be very likely) is to WebGL what SVG is to canevas. This relationship is nicely explained in the following figure found at x3dom.org

SVG, canvas, WebGL and X3DOM relation

Alpha implementations work with browsers that implement WebGL (e.g. Firefox 4.0). See X3DOM for more information. Firefox 4 users will have to enable WebGL (see the Tour 3D).

Links

• X3dom.org. This initiative is lead be the Fraunhofer Institute, i.e. the German CS/IT research institute.

Publications

• Johannes Behr, Peter Eschler, Yvonne Jung, and Michael Z\&\#246;llner. 2009. X3DOM: a DOM-based HTML5/X3D integration model. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on 3D Web Technology (Web3D '09), Stephen N. Spencer (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 127-135. DOI=10.1145/1559764.1559784 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1559764.1559784

J. Behr, Y. Jung, J. Keil, T. Drevensek, M. Zoellner, P. Eschler, and D. Fellner. 2010. A scalable architecture for the HTML5/X3D integration model X3DOM. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Web 3D Technology (Web3D '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 185-194. DOI=10.1145/1836049.1836077 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1836049.1836077