Slides, Filters and Mobile Oh My! (Demonstrations of HTML and Declarative 3D Integration)

Abstract

This paper describes a set of demonstrations that illustrate some of the advantages of declarative 3D. Putting descriptions of 3D geometry directly into the DOM structure of a web document offers content creators the ability to use the rich infrastructure that already exists for the development and deployment of web pages. The three demonstrations illustrate the use of 3D in the context of a slide show (HTML as slide show substitute), of new CSS3 filtering capabilities, and finally the use of jQuery mobile to provide a user interface framework around pages containing 3D graphics.

1. INTRODUCTION

A collection of three demonstrations is described in this short paper. Each of the demos highlights an aspect of declarative 3D. Placing 3D geometry directly into the DOM of web pages allows content developers to leverage the rich infrastructure that already exists for the development and deployment of web pages. Each of these examples may be viewed live on the web (URLs are listed in the descriptions). The three demonstrations cover the usage of declarative 3D in the context of 1) a slide show, 2) integrated with CSS content filtering and 3) integrated with jQuery mobile, a JavaScript framework for mobile devices. These particular demonstrations use X3DOM[ 1 ], however, the principles are generalizable to any declarative 3D technology.

2. Deck.js

URL: math.nist.gov/~SRessler/deckjs/introduction/index2x3d.html Deck.js [ 2 ] is a clever little JavaScript framework that enables users to create slideshows within the context of a web browser. Simply code up your slides and present your show via a set of Copyright  2012 for the individual papers by the papers’ authors. Copying permitted only for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.

Dec3D2012 workshop at WWW2012, Lyon, France web pages. Upon discovering this suite, naturally the question was can Web3D graphics be embedded into those types of slide show pages? The short answer is yes and this demo illustrates the results of this test.

3. CSS3 Content Filtering

URL: math.nist.gov/~SRessler/x3dom/CSS3-Content-Filter/index.html The new version of CSS3 offers the ability to filter content based on the class attribute of an element. In this example, modeled after Gupta[ 3 ], the actual filtering is via “negation pseudo-class” combined with the class attibute. In code it looks like: a[class=”threed”]:focus ~ div:not( [class=”threed”]) { }

height:0px; width:0px; border: none; margin:0;

4. jQuery mobile

URL: math.nist.gov/~SRessler/x3dom/jqmobile.html jQuery mobile [4] is “A unified, HTML5-based user interface system for all popular mobile device platforms, built on the rocksolid jQuery and jQuery UI foundation.” This demonstration was created to see if the jQuery mobile framework could in fact work with pages that have declarative 3D embedded in the page. As the demo illustrates the answer is yes, however, there were issues initially. On first loading the slideshow the 3D content displayed once and then disappeared. It turns out that, perhaps due to a peculiarity of X3DOM or the peculiarities of the browser (Chrome in this case), the graphics much be cached and remain in the cache. Fortunately jQuery mobile has a function to “precache” page content and this solved the problem.

DISCLAIMER: Please note that mention of any commercial products, companies and technologies does not constitute an endorsement by NIST. [4] jQuery mobile, http://jquerymobile.com

References

[1] Johannes Behr , Peter Eschler , Yvonne Jung , Michael Zöllner, X3DOM: a DOM-based HTML5/X3D integration model , Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on 3D Web Technology, June 16-17 , 2009 , Darmstadt, Germany [doi>10.1145/1559764.1559784]

[2] Deck .js http://imakewebthings.github.com/deck.js/

[3] Gupta , http://www.priteshgupta.com/ 2011 /12/css3-contentfilter -using-negation-pseudo-class/