2D-Navigation
3D virtual worlds are one of the most fascinating aspects in computer science.
Visualizing those abstract math formulas rises them up and makes them living in a dedicated world.
Here some insight in this world by showing examples of different parts of virtual reality, which are now open to the web.
Most of the functionality underlies constant development, so be warned on the permanent ALPHA STATE of this site! I'm not (knowingly) spreading viruses or evil content, but your browser may become a cube or even a torus before vaporising...
Be on the safe side - some new WebGL Scenes you will find at
New HTML5 elements rendered in WebGL are mixed with some historical background, a few shockwaves and O3D among the following pages.
I recommend to use Firefox 4+ or Chrome as browser which all of the content was tested against.
Unfortunatly there is no go to Internet Explorer, because Microsoft decided not to implement the WebGL standard in their browser despite most IT companies do.
Meanwhile you may use Google's chromeframe plugin in MSIE to render WebGL content anyway.
Milestones
Back in 1999 I already dedicated diploma
'Visualizing complex 3D data in realtime' at HTW Berlin to the topic,
which was the description of an implementation of recent algorithms on a dedicated hardware platform (Trimedia).
Some of the aspects had been visualized in VRML to give the audience a better insight during presentation. Some of the topics are still ongoing so update in WebGL is work in progress...)
O3D a free available plugin to render hardware accelerated 3D content in webbrowsers on all platforms has been published by Google around 2009.
Active development of the plugin has been stopped 2010 favouring in support to WebGL.
But still the plugin can be downloaded, or using Chrome with buildin support may show you few example code in here.
WebGL to show hardware accelerated 3D content has been developed by Khronos Group as open standard.
WebGL is based on Javascript and OpenGL ES and supports Linux, Mac and Windows.
Pages on this site are heavily based on WebGL, which has become draft standard with specification 1.0 since feb 2011.
Shockwave (dcr) is a proprietary 3D format from Adobe which supports hardware accelerated rendering on Windows and Mac not Linux
Note: The swf flash plugin from Adobe isn't able to render it.
The only Shockwave authoring tool is Adobe Director.
You will need to install the free plugin from their site to see the content.
VRML is a description language of hierarchical 3D scenes,
which has been developed independently from W3C for the web.
The implementations (as plugins or standalone applications) are missing hardware acceleration; this means - no photorealistic content which relies on hardware intensive methods like raytracing to enable reflections or shadows and so on.
The successor format X3D implements some of these missing features but didn't find his way into the browsers.
Since 2010 the X3DOM project from Fraunhofer presented his API on WebGL,
which uses the same description language as X3D to build 3D scenegraphs.
Very exciting for webmasters!
Since the success of 3-D presentations like Avatar, stereoscopic content became more and more successful.
Stereoscopy is known since over 100 years (1853), existed in film since the 1950s, but can be achieved on computers more easily.
See how and