Screenshot taken from here, data courtesy of the British Geological Survey, powered by rasdaman

EarthServer is an EU-funded project aimed at establishing open access and ad-hoc analytics on extreme-size Earth Science data. Part of this endeavor is the development of tools for 3D web access to these data endpoints that respect the protocols and languages common in the geospatial data processing domain, specifically various OGC standards. The EarthServer 3D Web Client middleware is built on top of X3DOM and currently under active development.

We are proud to announce the release of X3DOM 1.5. This most recent installment of our popular Declarative3D polyfill shines with lots of new features and a wagon load full of bugfixes.

With version 1.5, X3DOM also overcomes some limits of the scenegraph structure by using new internal structures for culling and fast rendering, decoupled from the frontend graph inside the DOM, which, however, still remains intact as usual.

New Features

• Generally improved traversal and rendering performance with a new transformation and volume caching infrastructure
• Culling techniques for large model rendering (some of them still experimental) – check the video, or see the tutorial
• Improved experimental binary geometry container and encoding
  • BinaryGeometry with more compact encoding that only uses 7 Bytes per triangle (see example) and works nicely on mobile devices
  • POPGeometry for progressive streaming and LOD – see the paper and project page here, or directly check some examples
• Experimental BVH Refiner node, for rendering of large, regular data sets with dynamic LOD (see tutorial and example)
• Shadow support for large scenes and all lights types (see tutorial for more information or click here or here for a demo)
• Convenience object ‘Moveable’ for object manipulation
• Additional X3D component plugins (not part of the HTML profile, i.e. not part of the x3dom.js package)
  • CADGeometry component
  • Geometry3DExt component (ElevationGrid and Extrusion, missing level 4 nodes)

Fixes and Improvements

• Many internal improvements and bugfixes
  
• DOM/Scene update improvements (e.g Route removal implemented)
• Improved picking functionality to enhance trade-off between precision and number of possible ids
• Fullscreen convenience method x3dom.toggleFullScreen()
• RenderedTexture extensions for rendering normal buffer or stereo (currently only for Oculus Rift)

For a detailed list of changes refer to the CHANGELOG file.

Grab the frozen 1.5.0 version here or fly with the cutting-edge development version here.

Back in June we’ve presented a prototype of a new RESTful interface to exchange graphics based data values across networks at Web3D 2013. This interface can be used to query data from a running application, modify or use it to display something. Said prototype is implemented inside InstantIO, the hardware component of Instant Reality which supports more than 40 devices. For the first time now, you’re able to query hardware information from InstantIO through Javascript from a browser. We’ve set up a tutorial on how to connect a Oculus Rift HMD to an X3DOM application: X3DOM renders a scene as distorted stereo image but connects via REST API to a local InstantIO server, opens a WebSocket connection on the orientation field of the Oculus and uses the incoming data to rotate the view!

You can do this of course with arbitrary hardware (think of the LEAP support or the Kinect), but please bear in mind that this is only a preview at the moment.

You can find the tutorial here. Enjoy!