Re: 3D -- WebGL and SVG?

Doug Schepers certainly brought up at the SVG F2F that he'd like
to pursue a higher level graphics layer which supports immediate and 
retained mode graphic backends.

We would certainly want to use the GPU when possible to efficiently 
manage array buffers.
It's much nicer to send a typed array of coordinates through a method, 
than to send
a DOMString of coordinates through to the DOM.

polyline is a point where SVG and "3D" meet.

Point clouds, and items with a large amount of points, such as the IE 
Fish Demo,
are another area where the two meet.

In most of my use cases, the serialization format is InkML, with SVG 
describing
the repeated images (fish, a paint brush mask, etc); those can be rasterized
via Canvas 2d and uploaded to the 3d context.

-Charles

On 8/7/2011 6:23 AM, David Dailey wrote:
>
> On 03/08/2011, at 9:24 AM, I wrote:
>
>  How else might we conceptualize markup for 3D? Is this something 
> worth thinking about here?[SVG WG]
>
> And on Friday, August 05, 2011 8:17 PM Dean Jackson replied:
>
> --------------
>
> It depends what you mean by "thinking about". I personally don't feel 
> that the SVG WG is the right place for discussions on 3d. I also think 
> that markup languages are extremely difficult to get right 
> (considering there is only one truly successful markup language at the 
> moment), and that 3d has such broad use cases that at best you'd be 
> targeting a small subset of the community. Speaking of community, the 
> W3C has very little involvement from there - I can't see how it would 
> manage anything better than X3D or Collada, both of which were 
> designed by domain experts over a long period.
>
> The only thing that's in the domain of SVG is making sure that it can 
> be used with 3d technology. I don't think there is much to do there, 
> but I might be wrong.
>
> --------------
>
> Hi Dean,
>
> 3D, per se, may be even lie beyond SVG's charter. But 2.5D isn't and 
> several activities and proposals that address 3D-ish effects have come 
> forward within the SVG WG.
>
> It strikes me, from a very naïve perspective, that X3D is much lower 
> level in the 3D realm than SVG is in the 2D realm and that Collada is 
> more of a higher level glue meant to hold other chunks together. They 
> are both XML vocabularies, but they are not quite what I'd call 
> declarative languages, in the same way that HTML, SVG and SMIL are.
>
> The incubator group I mentioned can be seen at 
> http://www.x3dom.org/x3dom/w3c/charter/ and targets, as a 
> collaboration with the SVG WG:
>
> "The XG coordinates closely with the SVG WG on common features and 
> concepts of 2D and 3D graphics."
>
> So, maybe, as you say, the domain of SVG is limited to making sure it 
> can be used with 3D technology, but it is possible that the 
> similarities, and markup **could** share a lot more in common. SVG has 
> done a lot of things very very well. It is conceivable that slight 
> extensions to the conceptual space outlined by SVG + SMIL + replicate 
> could motivate just the sort of declarative language that the 
> incubator group seems to be seeking. After all, most of the 
> mathematics of higher dimensional space is written in notation that 
> appears in 2D <humor />.
>
> On a tangential note, irrelevant to the basic discussion, if by the 
> one truly successful markup language you mean HTML, I think its 
> success was less due to its careful crafting than to the remarkable 
> void that existed pulling **any** suitable declarative language into 
> that hungry space at the time.
>
> Cheers
>
> David
>