3D Power Sparks

I wonder why Away3D looks a lot like PV3D? Away3D seems easier to work with.   I think some of the developers started with Away3D or maybe it’s the other way around. Well both are flash based 3D viewers and both are really limited for viewing large data sets.  The main issue is flash does not access the GPU and the flash 3d viewers all rely on the painters algorithm to fake 3d content.

In the past, maybe security concerns or the lack of 3d capable graphic cards kept 3D Viewer plugins from using a more robust 3D engine.  I’m not an expert, although  I have been looking into web 3D viewer technology since 2003.  Because none of the viewers seemed to meet the need, I helped Precision Lightworks prototype a 3D Viewer plugin which I integrated with a Flex GIS application.  Our prototype views large 3D urban model datasets, textured buildings and ground maps.  It does this and a few other things really well.  However, it would be ideal to have a flash based 3d viewer that used the 3D processor which are now on most computers.

A robust Flash 3D engine would be nice, but it would be good to have an underlying access to 3D from the browser environment, so lots of different apps or plugins in different languages could easily get access to 3D features to drive their displays.

Recently, Thunderhead (Mansour Raad) had developed a 3D Route Finder using Papervision3D, which I am a fan of.  But in discussion, he suggested looking into Away3D, so I did.   Away3D provides a professional web presence and good tutorials, but I really was glad to find “Switch on the code” which provides a good tutorial on how to get started.  Away3d comes with zip read and write utilities by Dave Chang which I may have seen in PV3D as well. The comparison needs to be completed yet, however, what really caught my eye was the use of Haxe which does some cool stuff related to OpenGL.

There is not any easy explanation, a lot is going on with the anticipated release of the new web standard of HTML 5, and the subsequent javascript innovations for SVG and 3D content, which is expected to be released mid 2010. This is a huge undertaking, and if “Fully Successful”, makes the use of browser plugins obsolete.  The Khronos Group, who manages OpenGL, is expected to develop the WebGL. The Khronos Group, is porting the OpenGL library to a web standard called WebGL, which will make it possible to access the graphics processor.  You can read about it on Draw Logic.  This isn’t really “news”, since the standard has been under development for sometime now.

However, After Chrome’s release, Google is hosting an HTML 5, SVG, and Canvas experiment, with a moderate list of samples developed by some of the web’s best known web-3d developers.  One of these samples uses Sandy, one of the sisters, to export the Sandy 3D Flash content into JavaScript using Haxe.  (By the way, be sure to check out Mr. Doob’s samples. He’s always modest, and one of my favorites.)

Even Adobe is discussing their concern, and it seems Adobe Flash customers don’t need to worry (i.e. Flash will write IPhone Apps in CS5).  I bet Adobe is thinking “it’s about time” and moving forward with their own plans to expose their own version of OpenGL in AS3.  Remember hydra? Hydra was the first indication from Adobe Labs that Adobe was working on accessing the graphics card

Well, I am sure all of it is going to be discussed at Adobe’s LA 2009 Max conference, so stay tuned.

A parting thought, Adobe Flash Player plugin is going to develop further into the 3D viewer arena as far as I can see, and even new plugins, like Silverlight, are going to fill obvious gaps that HTML 5 and JavaScript WebGL cannot fill.  While Unity3D and Torque 3D present some compelling gaming authoring environments, I feel encouraged that so many innovations are being developed.