Damon at the Metaverse One blog recently wrote about X3D-Earth, a new ‘extensible 3D (X3D) Earth project’ under development by the Web 3D Consortium.
X3D is intended to be used by just about everyone. The X3D Web site describes the mission: “The X3D-Earth project will create a standards-based 3D visualization infrastructure for visualizing all manner of real-world objects and information constructs in a geospatial context.” It is funded by the National Science Foundation and its suppoters include the World Wide Web Consortium and the Open Geospatial Consortium.
The flip-side to X3D is Google Earth (GE), which is the most widely-used mirror world right now. But Damon takes issue with the fact that GE is owned by a company.
Google Earth, he writes, is “not a true mirror world in the sense that no one entity owns our real planet…these 3D cities and other building information models are simply too resource-intensive to be effectively developed by any isolated group or single company.”
According to Damon, “The X3D-Earth project will create a standards-based 3D visualization infrastructure for visualizing all manner of real-world objects and information constructs in a geospatial context.” His blog contains some nifty videos and screenshots of the X3D development.
I have to chuckle when I read this because I wonder how it ties into that other big-deal standardization push going on now with the MMOXies (formerly the AWGroupies who now invaded IETF). If you don’t call it a world, but call it a “3-D visualization infrastructure,” do you get to play different standards?
And this idea that it’s evil if just one company does something because “nobody owns the planet,” well, ok, but…why isn’t it evil if just one group of opensourceniks do it? I mean, why does being “open source” somehow confer a blessing on it? Why does *this guy* and not some *other guy* get to declare his project is THE standards-based 3-D thingie?
Dusan there is a correction on my blog I am passing along, X3D-Earth was funded by IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity ). Thanks for posting this as it is nice to see others reporting on the EXISTING 3D web standard!
For Prokofy, I figured you too well versed in the virtual worlds crowd to not know what is the ISO ratified standard for interactive 3D on the web (X3D), and the difference between open source and open standard. Perhaps I am assuming too much.