[Fiware-miwi] 3D UI: what should we use for rendering, and why?

Kristian Sons kristian.sons at dfki.de
Mon Sep 30 14:55:52 CEST 2013


Dear all,

very confusing the discussion. I was not in Winterthur, but I think we 
are very open for your idea to use three.js to implement XML3D and we 
proposed several approaches how to start this. However, I also want to 
highlight, that this will be some work and some overhead that each of 
the approaches will induce. Especially a good integration of Xflow is 
not trivial. It would require some heavy adoptions of three.js which in 
turn invalids the argument having better maintenance. It would be a pity 
to spend all the resources to create something that is similar or less 
to what xml3d.js can do today.

Arguing with number of contributors within a project that's intended to 
_promote_ the GEs is not very smart.

However, I fully understand the SMEs POVs and their concerns. I'm pretty 
sure that we can come up with something that fulfills the project's 
requirements (DOM-integration, declarative data flows) but still 
generates added value for the SMEs. I like Toni's idea to look into 
scalability of large scene etc.

Best,
   Kristian


Am 30.09.2013 13:53, schrieb Jonne Nauha:
> Yeah, the people who are doing the 3D GEs should really evaluate 
> different renderers and their maturity. The things is that three.js 
> does have a lot of stuff out there that works and is in production, I 
> bump to a new 3D web projects pretty much every week and if you check 
> what it is using, it's always three.js. The lib has kind of defacto 
> statutus right now, which does not mean it cannot be replaced but 
> means that some performance, functionality or "nice to program 
> against" etc. reasoning is needed.
>
> The companies involved from Oulu already have multiple prototypes, 
> demos and developer experience with the three.js library. Us at 
> Adminotech have a very functional virtual world client WebRocket, that 
> uses three.js and we have been working on it for a long time, long 
> before we applied to FIWARE. For me as the maintainer of that project 
> would need very good reasons to move to XML3D renderer as I would need 
> to rewrite parts of our product with that jump. Product that is 
> already used for commercial application. I can surely make that jump 
> if I get better visuals and better performance. But with the WebRocket 
> product I'm less interested in things like XFlow or DOM integration, I 
> just don't see these things very useful/important for the end user 
> that actually is using the web app. I know these exact things are 
> important for MIWI and we would need to do some work on for example 
> XFlow integration/extension to three.js, if its picked.
>
> As Toni said the declarative scene parts and showing the active scene 
> in the DOM is already been discussed to do with XML3D, its the best 
> thing out there for defining your scene in the DOM. The thing that 
> needs to be investigated is if XML3D is practical to use as a renderer 
> over something else. This is what I was referring too when at the 
> London even when we had the hangout, that we would like to use the DOM 
> spec from XML3D, to do declarative scenes and show the scene state 
> always in the DOM, but does it also imply we must use your rendering.
>
> Best regards,
> Jonne Nauha
> Meshmoon developer at Adminotech Ltd.
> www.meshmoon.com <http://www.meshmoon.com>
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 8:12 AM, Tomi Sarni 
> <tomi.sarni at cyberlightning.com <mailto:tomi.sarni at cyberlightning.com>> 
> wrote:
>
>     Although i am not really working on rendering in FI-WARE GEs I
>     feel Toni builds a strong case here. Please have a look at GitHubs,
>
>     https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js
>     https://github.com/xml3d/xml3d.js/
>
>     Other one has 5 contributors and other 200.
>
>     just my 5 cents
>
>
>     On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 10:22 AM, Toni Alatalo <toni at playsign.net
>     <mailto:toni at playsign.net>> wrote:
>
>         There is nothing up from the DFKI side for the 3D GE specs yet
>         so I don't know whether those texts will address this.
>         However,  I think it is time to raise this important question
>         regarding the 3D UI Epic: what tech should we use for
>         rendering, and why? If the GE spec texts answer this, great,
>         as then we have both the question and the answer.
>
>         I know Philipp already once stated that he does not even want
>         to discuss this as XML3d was defined in the proposal. This is
>         a misunderstanding due to the fact that XML3d means two
>         things: The proposal defined the 1. spec, the XML schema and
>         the way of DOM integration, over e.g. X3D and X3DOM or TXML.
>         The proposals from all stages explicitly define how the 2.
>         rendering technology is to be investigated -- that's why we
>         had the discussions in Winterthur about for example whether it
>         would work to use Three for rendering within the XML3d.js
>         framework etc. This was also made explicit in the architecture
>         diagram that we delivered in the negotiation phase in spring.
>
>         My main point here is: no matter what tech we decide to use,
>         we must have a solid explicit rationale for choosing it. When
>         a realXtend user asks me why we chose that particular tech I
>         want to be able to explain it clearly and even point to a
>         design rationale document with more details. It is such an
>         important decision in this very important project so we can't
>         just overlook it and go with something.
>
>         Regarding the goals of FI-WARE, in my understanding, this is a
>         business decision. That is: the purpose of FI-WARE is to boost
>         Internet application business, and the evaluation criteria is
>         the rate and success in adoption by developers. If someone
>         knows a useful framework for business decision evaluation or
>         has experience in doing this kind of analysis, please do tell.
>         I'm only formally educated in tech (and humanities) and just a
>         self-taught businessman (though for 19 years already :)
>
>         My simple view from a business perspective is this: when
>         targeting business use, it helps to start the use as soon as
>         possible. This way you get developers and even end users
>         involved right in the beginning, get feedback of how things
>         work for them and can continue development in a more informed
>         manner. Community is born and knowledge about your offering
>         starts to spread. Ideally other platform developers join you
>         in the effort or start developing their own related product so
>         you start getting an economy with multiple parties etc. (I've
>         heard of the the term time-to-market, probably means something
>         at least close to this).
>
>         To end this post, where the aim is only to rise the question
>         and not have answers yet, a concrete example about the
>         situation we have here right now: The Oulu3DLive city model is
>         now being prepared for first launch. With some simple
>         applications that hopefully are already useful for the
>         citizens. The Oulu3DInfra-project on the University of Oulu
>         side got a grant (800kEUR for 2013-2014) for the modeling and
>         city-specific applications. There we have -- together with the
>         Oulu3d Ltd. company which the city chose to operate the
>         service and develop it into a business -- decided to target
>         already the first major public launch with the Web client to
>         not require the masses to install Tundra or anything. The
>         Infra-project knows about FI-WARE and, I think rightfully,
>         expects MIWI to deliver a functional Web client and the whole
>         platform for the launch.
>
>         So where are we with the tech on the FI-WARE side? The first
>         rendering test with the old optimized 9-blocks model has been
>         made both with XML3d.js in Three.JS (linked from the reqs/use
>         cases doc). Both load and show the geometry OK. XML3d.js
>         misses most of the textures, I think because they are not in a
>         compressed format so they won't fit memory? The Three.JS
>         version shows all the textures from the desktop-gpu friendly
>         compressed data from DDS files. XML3d folks have already
>         described how they plan to add support for compressed textures
>         and how it should be easy enough.
>
>         So one way forward would be to work on improvements to
>         XML3d.js: compressed texture use, shadows (discussed in
>         Winterthur), what else is missing?
>
>         But how would that make sense businesswise? As with Three.JS
>         we already have all that working and a successful test has
>         been online for weeks now so that the potential platform users
>         (e.g. app developers e.g. at Oulu3d Ltd. and university) have
>         been able to verify that it works etc. Why would we go back,
>         instead of continuing forward to meet new challenges? For
>         example the culling / resource management that the extended
>         model (>30 blocks heavily textured) will require and probably
>         there are other things too. It would be nice to have a first
>         solution for that scalability challenge in a few weeks
>         already. It does not require novel research, I think, as
>         dealing with complex scenes is already well known in the
>         literature.
>
>         Please don't get me wrong: I don't have anything against
>         XML3d.js. If there are good reasons to use it -- for example
>         better performance, a good architecture that facilitates
>         scalability for large complex scenes well, and a great API for
>         app development -- that's great! It then solves business
>         problems for us and makes good sense. I just want to point out
>         that we should know that explicitly, and am willing to work on
>         this analysis if we figure it's useful (the reqs & use cases
>         doc already gives some ground for this effort too). Ease of
>         XFlow integration is an important point in my understanding:
>         for example if an app dev uses XFlow to declare a generated
>         GLSL shader, is it then easy to use that with whatever
>         renderer, or much more straightforward with XML3d.js?
>
>         ~Toni
>
>         P.S. I'm not discussing the declarative authoring & the scene
>         serialization formats etc. here as, like mentioned above, that
>         was settled to begin with in favour of XML3d.
>
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-- 
_______________________________________________________________________________

Kristian Sons
Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH, DFKI
Agenten und Simulierte Realität
Campus, Geb. D 3 2, Raum 0.77
66123 Saarbrücken, Germany

Phone: +49 681 85775-3833
Phone: +49 681 302-3833
Fax:   +49 681 85775--2235
kristian.sons at dfki.de
http://www.xml3d.org

Geschäftsführung: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster (Vorsitzender)
Dr. Walter Olthoff

Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans A. Aukes
Amtsgericht Kaiserslautern, HRB 2313
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