AW: Generalized Resources in XML3D

Dear Kristian,

almost a year after your post to the mailing list: thanks a lot for providing these interesting and inspiring points :-)

Regarding X3D 4.0, or an X3DOM integration of your proposals, I would guess that point 1 (intra-document references) and point 3 (inter-document references) are, at least in parts, already covered by X3D USE and <Inline> (IMPORT/EXPORT) mechanisms?
How do your proposals relate to those concepts? 

The concept of composed and (even partially) shared mesh data, which is employed by Xflow, is also very interesting. Looking at Figure 2 of the Xflow paper, it looks like <float3> and similar tags would always use a textual description - did you already try to use some form of binary containers here, like X3DOM BinaryGeometry and glTF do?

Thanks a lot in advance!

Best Regards,

Max


-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Kristian Sons [mailto:kristian.sons@dfki.de] 
Gesendet: Montag, 22. April 2013 15:16
An: public-d3d mlist
Betreff: Generalized Resources in XML3D

Hello,

no discussion on the mailing list for some time. Thus I would like to raise a topic that seems to become more important and is strongly related to the discussion on transmission formats.

We recently published a paper at SEARIS 2013 [1] that explains the architecture of xml3d.js. It's not directly related to the general Polyfill architecture that we propose in the CG but rather explains the concrete implementation of xml3d.js. It's very technical. But an interesting topic for our Dec3D discussion is the _generalized resource concept_, that we (finally) introduced in xml3d.js and that is interesting for our initiative. I think, the general tendency in XML3D as well as in X3DOM is to mix DOM representation with external data. IGD has developed some interesting transmission formats and we have a simple but powerful concept to use these (and other) formats in a generic way. 
Here a very simple example:

1. Intra-document references:
<mesh type="triangles" src="#teapot-data"/>

The data is really in the DOM and freely accessible using the DOM API or libraries such as jQuery

2. External references to a single entity:
<mesh type="triangles" src="teapot.json"/>

The whole mesh data set in a document, the document has no other information than the mesh data

3. External references to a structured document:
<mesh type="triangles" src="primitives.xml#teapot"/>

The concept is recursive, i.e. a structured document can itself contain references again. In XML3D, the concept not only works for meshes, but also for material descriptions, transformations, light parameters etc. 
In combination with Xflow, it allows for dynamic attributes. We have shown, that this concept can even work with more complex mesh encodings such as SIG (using smart shader compositing).

This might not be too relevant for hand-crafted scenes, but is very powerful in client-server architectures, especially in a REST context. 
For instance, it allows to adapt the data transmission during runtime. 
On the other hand, if you need specialized nodes for each transmission format (IndexedFaceSet, ImageGeometry etc), one moves this logic to application level (adding/removing node instances at runtime).

It fits very well to other W3C initiatives, where the composition of HTML documents from several source is becoming increasingly important. 
Maybe this could also be a concept for X3D 4.0?

Best regards,
Kristian

[1] http://www.searis.net/index.php5/Main_Page


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________________________________________________________

Kristian Sons
Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH, DFKI Agenten und Simulierte Realität Campus, Geb. D 3 2, Raum 0.77
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Phone: +49 681 85775-3833
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Received on Monday, 10 March 2014 10:23:46 UTC