Two standardization organizations initiate cooperation to accelerate market adoption of pervasive connected 3D; Initial focus is synergy between X3D and COLLADA
17th April, 2007 — Web3D Symposium, Perugia, Italy — The Khronos Group and the Web3D Consortium announced today that they have executed a liaison agreement to enable the flow of draft specifications and feedback between the two organizations. This liaison will enable cooperative initiatives to align and combine the use of standards from both groups to drive the growth of connected 3D on mobile and embedded devices as well as on the Web. The initial focus of this liaison is to leverage the existing synergy between the X3D and COLLADA standards from Web3D and Khronos respectively. A white paper exploring how these two standards complement each other can be found here: www.khronos.org/collada/presentations/Developing_Web_Applications_with_COLLADA_a nd_X3D.pdf.
COLLADA is an XML-based asset interchange format that enables the use of diverse digital content creation tools to author sophisticated assets for use by 3D applications, including animation, shaders and physics effects. COLLADA represents authored data in multiple forms, enabling the transformation of assets as they journey from content tools that use high-level descriptions to run-time applications that require optimized, platform-specific representations. X3D is an XML-based delivery format focused on the visualization of 3D assets and contains the information needed for interactive applications – traditionally on the Web. X3D specifies behaviors and interactions, includes a specific run-time model that enables picking, viewing, navigation, and scripting, and defines an API to manipulate the scene graph at run-time.
“There is already a high degree of synergy between the COLLADA and X3D XML-based standards, and by closely aligning our efforts we can ensure that real-time X3D applications can seamlessly benefit from COLLADA-based authoring environments,” said Alan Hudson, president of the Web3D Consortium and CEO of Yumetech. “Khronos has also set the foundation for mobile accelerated 3D with OpenGL ES and Web3D will benefit significantly from having a closer link to that standard that will accelerate compelling X3D applications on a huge diversity of embedded devices.”
“We are on the verge of a revolution in connected, mobile 3D applications and this cooperation opens the opportunity to accelerate this market development by leveraging over a decade of experience in the Web3D community,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “The Web3D Consortium has made significant progress in bringing real-time, connected 3D into the medical imaging, military simulation, geospatial, CAD, and web-based visualization markets. This liaison has the potential to accelerate the synergistic use of both groups’ standards in these ground-breaking opportunities.”
About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenGL, OpenKODE, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX, OpenVG, OpenSL ES, OpenML and COLLADA to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.
About the Web3D Consortium
The Web3D Consortium is a non-profit, international standards organization focused on web-based 3D rendering that originally spearheaded the development of the VRML 1.0 and 2.0 specifications. Today, the Web3D Consortium is utilizing its broad-based industry support to continue developing the X3D specification for communicating 3D on the Web between applications and across distributed networks and web services. Through well-coordinated efforts with the ISO, the W3C and the Open GIS Consortium, the Web3D Consortium is maintaining and extending its standardization activities. Visit the Web3D Consortium at www.web3d.org.
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