Sopin, Ivan (Armstrong Atlantic State University), Hamza-Lup, Felix (Armstrong Atlantic State University)
Extensible 3D (X3D) modeling language is one of the leading Web3D technologies. Despite the rich functionality, the language does not currently provide tools for rapid development of conventional graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Every X3D author is responsible for building---from primitives---a purpose-specific set of required interface components, often for a single use. We address the challenge of creating consistent, efficient, interactive, and visually appealing GUIs by proposing the X3D User Interface (X3DUI) library. This library includes a wide range of cross-compatible X3D widgets, equipped with configurable appearance and behavior. With this library, we attempt to standardize the GUI construction across various X3D-driven projects, and improve the reusability, compatibility, adaptability, readability, and flexibility of many existing applications.
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Jung, Yvonne (Fraunhofer IGD), Marcus Roth (the Company), Sabine Webel (Fraunhofer IGD), Olbrich, Manuel (Fraunhofer-Institut für Graphische Datenverarbeitung), Drevensek, Timm, Franke, Tobias (Fraunhofer IGD), Fellner, Dieter
3D applications, e.g. in the context of visualization or interactive design review, can require complex user interaction to manipulate certain elements, a typical task which requires standard user interface elements. However, there are still no generalized methods for selecting and manipulating objects in 3D scenes and 3D GUI elements often fail to gather support for reasons of simplicity, leaving developers encumbered to replicate interactive elements themselves. Therefore, we present a set of nodes that introduce different kinds of 2D user interfaces to X3D. We define a base type for these user interfaces called "InteractiveTexture", which is a 2D texture node implementing slots for input forwarding. From this node we derive several user interface representations to enable complex user interaction suitable for both, desktop and immersive interaction.
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Cheung, Chun Pan, Godil, Afzal (National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA)
A web-based application has been developed for shape-based searching for industrial components. The application is based on Flex, which is excellent at providing highly interactive user interface, and O3D, which can display 3D models in a web browser efficiently. By combining the two technologies, the shaped-based industrial components searching system provides an effective way for users to search for industrial components and obtains other related information. This highly interactive 3D shape retrieval system is based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that relies on the REST based web-service model to create efficient web application.
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Eno, Joshua (University of Arkansas), Susan Gauch (University of Arkansas), Craig Thompson (University of Arkansas)
Linking between separate virtual world environments presents technical hurdles in terms of portability of avatars, inventory management, and authentication. However, because it is up to users to create the links, it is not clear to what extent the technical linking capability will lead to a truly interconnected world wide web of 3D environments. In order to study linking behavior in a current 3D environment, we examined explicit landmark links as well as implicit avatar pick links in Second Life to determine if linking patterns in a large virtual world corresponded to linking behavior in the traditional web. To collect landmark and favorites data, we designed a multi-agent virtual world crawler system to collect publicly available landmarks and avatar picks. We then compared the link graph structure of the virtual world link graph to previous research on the web link graph. We also explore the correlation between location ranking based on link-based algorithms to internally tracked traffic rankings to show that virtual world linking behavior is related to traffic in similar ways to hyperlinks and web traffic.