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I used to love VRML + Java/Javascript as a way of building 3d web-based environments. Of course VRML has died a death and during the course of my subsequent wanderings of the web I picked up a lot of noise about HTML5 and its Canvas element.

What I would like to do is revisit my VRML work of the late 90s with the new technology but what I've seen in the demo code out there is very low-level calls and the sort of API that would involve me doing some fairly complex maths (I am emphatically not a mathematician) and this has put me off the idea somewhat.

Does anyone know of any APIs or frameworks that might fit the bill and allow me to concentrate on modelling behaviour without having to get bogged down with geometry?

Thanks for reading.

Community
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immutabl
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I loved VRML too! I also browsed around WebGL and decided that I didn't really want to get into graphics programming, I wanted a tool like VRML.

I haven't tried these yet, but here's something to look at: X3DOM. It lets you write X3D (basically the XML equivalent of VRML right in with your html on your page, and have it displayed! See http://www.3d-test.com/interviews/x3d_2.htm for a discussion about all of this, and http://www.x3dom.org/ for the actual stuff. I wouldn't hold my breath that this will take over the world, but apparently at least at some level it's up and running and you can use it yourself today on some browsers that support it.

Ozan
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ViennaMike
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  • I had a look at X3d, but browser support is patchy to say the least. I've got a feeling HTML5 is going to be the way to go, but someone has to come up with JQuery for 3D first. I'm sure someone will, but judging from the number of responses to this quesion, the technology is still in its infancy and experts are pretty thin on the ground right now. – immutabl Mar 31 '11 at 23:35
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    Yes, I agree, support is sketchy, but that seems to be changing significantly just this month. HTML with WebGL is in Firefox 4 (now out) and it's in Chrome. Supposedly X3DOM (typo in my note, I wrote X2DOM) will run in an HTML5 file with those browsers, no plug-ins needed. So that's not bad! Will everyone be able to view it - no. But most never installed VRML plug-ins either. The biggest incompatibility is that Microsoft has no plans to support WebGL in IE. – ViennaMike Apr 01 '11 at 00:55
  • I didn't know about Firefox and Chrome being able to handle X3Dom?! That would be a pretty good place to start - I believe you can still get tools to transform classic VRML -> X3D. – immutabl Apr 01 '11 at 08:41
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    Once I installed FF4, I had to update my graphics driver to get WebGL to work, but now it works! There's even a JQuery example that I looked at with just FF4 out of the box and updated driver: http://x3dom.org/x3dom/example/x3dom_jQueryManip.xhtml – ViennaMike Apr 01 '11 at 14:59
  • Wow that's actually quite promising! I was getting shivers up the spine looking at the X3D code - such a long time since I coded in 3d... I think I'm going to have to pursue this. Many, many thanks for sharing. The hurdle is still going to be the WebGL itself - that syntax is horrible-looking. Fingers crossed for the JQuery X3D plugin ;-) – immutabl Apr 01 '11 at 19:34
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VRML and X3D are both valid and can be rendered in a canvas element

The X_ITE javascript-WebGL library - it can read VRML or X3D. I'm using it to update and deliver a legacy VRML project.

The X3D consortium sees both X3D and VRML as valid formats, the latter for more hand-coding, so VRML is still very much alive. What died was browser support, until recently.

Dave Everitt
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    Awesome news! Thanks much for sharing. Its 20yrs to the day I started with VRML -good to see it's still alive and well. – immutabl Feb 01 '20 at 23:09