Chris spoke about the Web3D consortium and the next generation, extensible 3D technology, X3D. As the specification says, "X3D defines a software system that integrates network-enabled 3D graphics and multimedia." X3D is a more powerful successor to VRML and is in the process of becoming an international standard. Chris presented details of Web3D's activities, explained X3D and showed some examples.

Chris Thorne has worked on a number of successful distributed IT development and R&D projects using Java and 3D graphics. He has also been an active member of the Web3D Consortium GeoVRML working group, developing 3D geospatial visualisation software and is involved with other web3D working groups such as X3D.

Chris actually presented the slides for his talk using X3D. You can find details of how to view or download his talk here.

Chris has kindly supplied some links and other pointers.

Main link for Web3D
Web3D resources

It is worth getting on the www-vrml list. For X3D there is quite a bit on the X3D working group link. However, it is still new, still stablising. There is a nice tool called x3d-Edit for a bit of XML- based authoring. The only x3d viewer that I know of which is close to working is xj3d do-it-yourself (DIY) browser from the www.j3d.org site.

SymbioticA was established in April 2000 to act as a porous membrane in which art and bio-medical sciences and technologies could mingle. This is an artist-run laboratory within a biological science department. Artists are encouraged to employ biological techniques as part of their practice.

Dr Stuart Bunt (Scientific Director) and Oron Catts (Artistic Director) presented some of the projects developed at SymbioticA recently.

After the talk, Stuart and Oron took some of us on a behind the scenes tour of SymbioticA's workspaces. Unfortunately, the haptic workbench wasn't available to us on the night. We will schedule a talk and a hands-on demonstration of it next year.

SymbioticA home page

The 60Hz Real-time Rendering Group (60Hz RRG) is a new graphics research group within the School of Computer Science & Software Engineering at The University of Western Australia. The primary goal of the group is to provide resources to assist honours and postgraduate students interested in real-time graphics. Some members of the group presented recent projects, including the Clean rendering library, portal based rendering and level of detail computation for rendering 3D models in realtime.

The 60 Hz Realtime redering group.