This paper presents a demonstration of an interactive 3D video on demand catalogue based on an innovative extension proposal to the X3D standard for 3D style sheets representation (X3DSS). This extension provides Web3D designers with a declarative way to build groundbreaking 3D graphical user interfaces (3DGUI) for Web3D. Thanks to new nodes allowing accessing a well-structured set of contents, the solution we propose o ers many bene ts. Indeed, this X3D extension takes advantage of both 3D declarative formats and style sheets. Firstly, the presented solution provides web3D designers with all essential features of X3D for building innovative 3DGUIs. Secondly, the extension brings the key features of a style sheet that enable the separation of the presentation and interaction semantics from the document content, well-suited for dynamic contents and presentation reusability. X3D based 3D style sheet o ers a high level declarative representation pooling both requirements of the Web and 3D graphics community.
A wide range of use cases could bene t of 3DGUIs on the Web, essentially when Web services consist in presenting a huge amount of multimedia contents (video, music or photo catalogues, art pieces, consumer items for v-shopping, navigation within open data, etc). Well-designed 3D graphical and interaction user interfaces can ease the navigation Copyright c 2012 for the individual papers by the papers’ authors. Copying permitted only for private and academic purposes.
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Dec3D2012 workshop at WWW2012, Lyon, France
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within a huge amount of multimedia contents while
improving the user experience. Firstly, the CSS3 based 3DGUIs
such as carousels, image cubes or walls, already become a
usual way to present a set of images or videos within web
pages. But more promising 3D presentations can
revolutionize the next generation of the Web by providing users with
a greater experience of navigation and interaction.
However, the usability of 3DGUIs, in terms of navigation
and interaction, is mainly related to the presentation
metaphor. The design of such new 3DGUIs requires e cient tools
to give designers with free rein to their creativity. The
standard le formats VRML and X3D, that have inspired most
of 3D formats, o ers graphic designers a declarative way
fully suitable for hardware graphic acceleration to de ne 3D
virtual applications. Moreover, related works proposed
solutions to automatically build 3D scenes presenting external
data sets such as a virtual museum with X-VRML [
The X3D extension for 3D style sheet aims to provide an e cient solution to de ne attractive and customized presentation metaphors for huge database visualization. Figure 1 shows the full pipeline strongly inspired by Web authoring tools. A content manager extracts the required information from an input database (a video on demand catalogue) and organizes them within a genotype thanks to a request manager. For his part, a web designer de nes the presentation metaphor thanks to an X3D based style sheet detailed next. This style sheet can include 2D or 3D assets designed by a computer graphic designer using any 3D computer graphic softwares. The X3D based style sheet can be directly loaded by a dedicated player, which will apply it on the y to input datas stored in a genotype and render the resulting 3DGUI in a standalone application, in a web browser or on a smartphone.
We present next the two main elements of our pipeline: the genotype and the X3D based style sheet. 2.2
The genotype is an XML le that stores the required data extracted from any kind of databases. The structure of the genotype is generic to be easily cross by the X3D based style sheet for accessing information. The structure of the genotype de nes the way the user will explore the data through the resulting 3DGUI. Inspired from websites structures, the genotype is mainly organized as a hierarchy or more generally a graph structure. Every nodes of the graph store attributes values for an element (a content node) or an exploration level (a depth description in the hierarchy). 2.3
The X3D extension for 3D style sheet aims to de ne the 3D space organization of data stored in the genotype. Indeed, we propose new X3D-based node categories to specify a 3D style-sheet:
Rules Node: A set of 3D reconstruction rules that are applied to each exploration level of the genotype (based on prototype mechanism), Genotype Exploration Nodes: Control ow operators such as loops or conditions to cross the genotype, Inquiries Nodes: Inquiries to get access to the information stored in each node of the genotype (based on IS mechanism).
As shown in gure 3, two implementations are proposed
to o er the best portability on main rendering outputs. The
rst one, suiting Web requirements, is described in [
A demonstration of a virtual environment for accessing a video on demand catalogue has been developed thanks to the proposed solution (see gure 4). The rst exploration level corresponds to the genre of the movies and uses a theatre carousel rule as a presentation metaphor. The second exploration level corresponds to the release years and uses a linear distribution of doors, and nally the last exploration level corresponds to the movies themselves and uses a linear distribution of panels.