Xbox Addict

3D Web Surfing On Your Xbox?

VRML is known as one of the highest known coding language right after HTML/XHTML. However only 1/10,000 sites use it. VRML means: Virtual Reality Modeling Language.

Just imagine this: A website about you but instead of boring HTML and Flash pages, you would see 3D pages and all sorts of 3D text and the download time is 1/5 that of Flash and Shockwave!

Here is the entire article as it appeared on Yahoo News as of March 2, 2002:

"The Web3D Consortium this week debuted a new specification it hopes will succeed where past efforts have failed and make 3D graphics a mainstream part of the Web.

A draft version of the new X3D -- or Extensible 3D -- standard was unveiled this week. It will be submitted to the International Standards Organization (ISO) later this year.

Backers hope X3D will have more success than VRML (virtual reality modeling language), which garnered plenty of attention but never took off. Developers envisioned using VRML to build 3D shopping malls, branded online characters, and interactive product models, among other applications.

Whether such uses ever catch the imagination of the everyday Web user remains the big question. Clearly, game boxes like PlayStation 2 and Xbox have made 3D graphics a mainstream phenomenon.

But VRML was also just as clearly ahead of its time. Bandwidth was not as plentiful several years ago as it is now, graphics accelerators were not widely deployed, and slower PC processors often choked on large 3D models. Also, the VRML community suffered the constant headache of trying to get VRML viewers bundled with ever-newer versions of Netscape and Microsoft browsers -- too often without success. That was made even more difficult because VRML browsers often checked in at several megabytes. X3D viewers, by comparison, start at a relatively lightweight 300 kbytes.

In a boost to the fledgling standard, the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) has chosen X3D as the basis for lightweight 3D graphics in the MPEG-4 standard.

X3D is built using a Java-based toolkit and XML schemas for lightweight delivery and fast performance. Source code is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License, which could also help the standard take hold."