X3D: Extensible 3D Graphics for Web Authors

Abstract

X3D is the ISO-standard scene-graph language for interactive 3D graphics on the Web. A new course is available for teaching the fundamentals of 3D graphics using Extensible 3D (X3D). Resources include a detailed textbook, an authoring tool, hundreds of example scenes, and detailed slidesets covering each chapter. The published book is commercially available, while all other course-module resources are provided online free under an open-source license. Numerous other commercial and open resources are available for X3D, which also serves as an interchange format. The supported course has been taught for many years, successfully introducing masters' students to the principles and techniques of 3D graphics without requiring programming experience. This course and module appears to be ready for undergraduate use. Expressing 3D within the domain of Extensible Markup Language (XML) for the Web is novel and has the potential to open up computer graphics to many new practitioners. This combined resource is intended broadly support computer graphics education and skills for web authors.