With Avatar a box-office hit and the Consumer Electronics Show displaying 3D televisions, a 3D interface with the Web cannot be far off, correct? Communications Research Centre (CRC) computer network researcher John Stewart sheds some light on the future of the Internet and the role that open standards will likely play in that future.

Stewart is CRC’s representative on the Web3D Consortium (www.web3d.org), which has contributed to the evolution of the Internet over the years by writing the computer language and defining the standards to render 3D graphic content. The original virtual reality mark-up language (VRML 1), developed in the mid-1990s, was followed by VRML 97 and later by extensible 3D (X3D) graphics. All have been adopted by the International Standards Organization (ISO).

Today, Stewart is chair of the Web3D Consortium’s X3D-HTML5 working group, which is working to integrate X3D – ISO standardized 3D graphics, and HTML – the hyper text mark-up language that “tells” the Web browser certain text is a heading, other text is body text, and a myriad of other features that define the “look” of a page.

Multi-cast conferencing enhanced with virtual reality

When Stewart joined the CRC in 1996, he was involved in projects funded by the European Commission involving multi-cast conferencing over the Internet. From their respective offices participants contributed via video, audio and a shared whiteboard. As it turns out, the “meat” of the meetings was in the whiteboard record; the video added little and the audio lacked the flexibility to allow sub-groups of participants to confer, as they could in a real meeting. Stewart proposed dropping the video component and replacing the audio capability with virtual world technology he was advancing at the time. FreeWRL 3D Graphics and MVIP-II networking produced proximity-based audio, so that a participant could approach fellow participants and have a conversation apart from the whole-group proceedings that were unfolding on the whiteboard.

Integral to virtual reality is 3D graphics and Stewart’s multi-cast conferencing experience told him where the trend was heading. The momentum toward more powerful and cheaper computer graphics will see consumers using 3D graphics to interface seamlessly with computer networks, he predicted.

The standardization process and evolution toward 3D in HTML

The Web3D standardization process requires at least two implementations of any element in a working X3D viewer before it becomes standardized. One of those viewers has to be open source. FreeWRL, the open source software Stewart shepherded, provided the perfect fit. Distributed by Apple, FreeWRL is downloaded, on average, 3,000 times a month. From viewing models of DNA to models of the International Space Station, FreeWRL has been used to render data for countless applications.

But viewing a Web page through an HTML browser like Firefox or Internet Explorer requires a plug-in to read a postscript file.

“Currently, Web browsing is all done in 2D graphics – click a button or image and text gets ‘redrawn’ on it. You cannot walk up and look around [an object] with fixed pictures,” explains Stewart. “With X3D as part of your Web page viewer, it’s no longer a plug-in, so the whole interface for your Web browser can be written in X3D.”

“If we are able to successfully include open standard 3D graphics with every Web browser – and we are – the ideas that CRC helped standardize will be in every networked device worldwide,” says Stewart.

The HTML 5 standard should be finalized in early 2010, but Stewart expects it will some time for all browser writers to include X3D.

For more information contact John Stewart, Computer Network Researcher at alex.stewart@crc.gc.ca or at 613-998-2079.