Interactive 3-D graphical objects can be an integral part of online shops. Credit: Uwe Bellhäuser |
When
customers visit an online shop, they want to see all parts of a
product; they want to enlarge it, or visualize adjusting single
elements. Until now, web developers have been dealing with a
multiplicity of different programs, in order to illustrate articles on
the Internet in such a complex way. The new HTML extension XML3D, which
offers the capability to describe computer scenes in spatial detail
directly within the website’s code, simplifies that. An online shop can
be extended with XML3D in just a few clicks, as researchers of the
Saarland University’s Intel Visual Computing Institute demonstrate at
stand F34 in hall 9 at the computer fair Cebit. The trade show takes
place in Hannover from 6 to 10 March 2012.
The
online shop’s website fills the whole screen of the laptop. In the
center, the image of a high-end digital camera appears. Just a few
finger moves on the touchpad are needed to move the model freely and to
enlarge or minimize it, no matter which objective has been set by the
mouse click.
“Up
to now, for every move of the different object modifications,
innumerable photos would have to be taken and then set together to an
animation with a special kind of software. Furthermore, it is not
necessarily the case that the potential customer’s browser already has
the appropriate add-on program,” Kristian Sons explains. He co-developed
the scene description language XML3D in the Intel Visual Computing
Institute (VCI)/German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
(DFKI). XML3D simply requires the appropriate 3D model, an Internet
connection and a browser.
“Using
XML3D, it is possible to embed three-dimensional content in such an
easy way on websites as had previously been achievable only with video
clips on the Internet,” adds Philipp Slusallek, professor for computer
graphics at Saarland University and scientific director in the DFKI and
VCI. This is realized with XML3D by adding the necessary elements to the
current HTML standard, HTML5. Besides text, images and videos, 3D
objects can also be pictured on the website. “All 3D components form
part of the HTML code that defines the website. Therefore, web
developers can create new 3D content by using their habitual programming
methods,” Slusallek explains.
The
Saarland computer scientists have already completed implementations of
XML3D for the Firefox or Chrome browsers, as well as for the web
programming language JavaScript, in combination with the browser
component WebGL. This JavaScript interface to graphics hardware is
already available in the latest versions of the browsers Firefox, Google
Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera. All implementations are free to use on
the project’s website.
In
the future, not only three-dimensional configurators for online
products but also interactive informational graphics, educational and
computer games should be programmed using XML3D. Thus, researchers are
working on a standardization of XML3D. In August 2011, in cooperation
with the Fraunhofer IGD and the Web 3D Consortium, the DFKI founded a
community within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that guarantees the
WWW standard. This represents the first phase of the standardization
process. Mozilla, Google and the international industrial consortium
Khronos Group already have shown their interest in this issue.
