TPAC meeting minutes 1 NOV 2011

Attendees:  Kristian Sons DFKI, Johannes Behr Fraunhofer,
Sandy Ressler NIST, Anita Havele Web3D, Mike Aratow Web3D,
Vince Hardy Adobe, Neil Trevett Khronos, Don Brutzman Web3D.

Thanks to W3C Team for getting us a meeting room.

1.  We applied some nice W3C and HTML5 stickers to our laptops.  8)
We also saw some excellent X3DOM and XML3D demos from Johannes and
Kristian, discussing volume visualization progress.

2.  We asked about the W3C AR community group.  There was no meeting
for this group at TPAC, and the mailing list has been silent for
about 2 months.  Not sure if they are still active.

Discussion question:  shouldn't this group have an AR use case?
We all agreed this was valuable to express as part of Declarative 3D.
We can distill our use cases from descriptions available on that site,
from the recent AR Standards Group meeting, from the new ISO SC24
working group 9, and from the X3D AR working group.

Anita gave us a summary report of the just-completed AR Standards Group
2-day meeting, 15 people attended.  We discussed various standards
alignment possibilities.

3.  Process suggestion:  declarative 3d community group teleconference
efforts probably ought to start using tools available to all W3C
working groups:
- IRC chat, scribing, and web logging for meeting minutes
- Action items list and issues list

4.  Discussed agenda for Wednesday afternoon breakout session.  Reviewed
and discussed the Declarative 3D Community Group slideset in complete
detail.  Kristian and Johannes presented a large and quite-impressive
series of demos.  Considered current issues and past lessons learned
in other W3C standards.

5.  Vincent provided a short summary of SVG filter effects as a way
to predictably offer underlying shader capabilities to SVG authors.
We talked at length about the effects work going on in CSS, he gave
a demo showing lots of impressive capabilities, and we discussed
some CSS/shader technical challenges where a 3D approach can help.

6.  Neil discussed rationale for a 3D transmission format.  At some
point, 3D assets need to go across the network and it might be a
valuable addition to ecosystem to have a format for 3D analagous
to JPEG for imagery, MP3 for audio, H264/MPEG4 for video, etc.
Alternative is that browsers have to do decoding in javascript
or content doesn't work.  Seems like an obvious hole.  Could do
an inventory of available work, discuss possibilities with MPEG etc.
Progressive streaming and compression would be primary benefits.

Interesting discussion (once again).

======================================
Here are things we didn't discuss yet.

7.  Requests for W3C
- (Need to confirm) community group support for IRC chat, trackers
- Occasional team review, feedback regarding goals and activities

8.  Areas where declarative 3D is very different from other media,
languages and web standards.  Rationale: establishing W3C Recommendation
for Declarative 3D should add new capabilities to the Web.  Undesired
alternative:  W3C members unconvinced that new work adds value.

- User-driven navigation in and around 3D models
- User-driven interaction:  selection, picking, collision detection
- Reuse and composition of individual 3D models into larger worlds
- Full integration of 3D models with HTML5 content by Web authors,
	allowing 2-way exchange of events via DOM
- Augmented Reality (AR) with user control of 3D display space,
	not simply 2D overlays on top of video feed
- Embeddable physics
-
-
- no doubt several others...


9.  We need to characterize shared relationships (+) and distinguishing
differences (-) between Declarative 3D goals and other W3C technologies.

+ integratable with HTML, as external or embedded page object
- different than SVG, native 3D representations essential, though many
	lessons of SVG design are relevant
- different than canvas: not low-level shader programming
+ DOM representation central to capture 3D scene graph.  Holding data
	structures in real time is now satisfactory with high-performance
	DOM implementations.
+ DOM event model is dissimilar to typical event-passing paradigm of
	most 3D scene graphs, but can be aligned
+ HTML5 interaction model needs to be utilized, e.g. HTML DOM level 2
	mouse events
+ Significant level of CSS capabilities can be utilized, possibly
	align HTML colors with 3D materials
- Need consistent accessibility so that navigation and usability is
	intuitive/predictable (rather than "lost is space")

Additional potential relationships with W3C Recommendations:
+ Most base types supported in XML Schema - add n-tuple arrays?
? Multimedia synchronization - other requirements beyond HTML5?
? XPath and XSLT support needed, possible?
? MathML support for equations?
? SVG, movie, canvas support for creating embedded texture images?

One way to get completely confounded would be if we cherry-picked
pieces and parts of W3C Recommendations.  Instead we should accept
specific requirements and interoperability to align Declarative 3D
compatibly with Open Web Platform.

10.  Use cases and requirements.  Needs work.  What's the plan?

all the best, Don
-- 
Don Brutzman  Naval Postgraduate School, Code USW/Br       brutzman@nps.edu
Watkins 270,  MOVES Institute, Monterey CA 93943-5000 USA   +1.831.656.2149
X3D graphics, virtual worlds, navy robotics http://faculty.nps.edu/brutzman

Received on Tuesday, 1 November 2011 20:53:14 UTC