Web3D Consortium is an international

not-for-profit A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

, member-funded industry consortium, originally founded in 1997. Web3D Consortium members from governmental, nonprofit and research organizations worldwide, including working alongside individual professional members to collaborate in a consensus process and encouraging development and implementation of open standards for 3D content and services. The Web3D Consortium promotes deployment of X3D standards for the communication of 3D scenes in multiple applications, use cases, platforms, and verticals. Members collaboratively develop the X3D standards and tools making them widely adopted across diverse markets for academia, government, industry, and individuals. The Web3D Consortium offers robust ISO standardized 3D functionality and long-term stability for enterprise solutions and interoperability with other 3D standards. The Consortium defines and develops the X3D royalty-free

open standard An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a prerequisite to use open license, non-discrimination and extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in the development. There is no single definitio ...

file format A file format is a Computer standard, standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary format, pr ...

and runtime architecture to represent and communicate 3D scenes. The development of 3D web-based graphics has evolved from its beginnings as the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (

VRML VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language, pronounced ''vermal'' or by its initials, originally—before 1995—known as the Virtual Reality Markup Language) is a standard file format for representing 3-dimensional (3D) interactive vector graph ...

) to Extensible 3D (

X3D X3D is a royalty-free ISO/IEC standard for declaratively representing 3D computer graphics. File format support includes XML, ClassicVRML, Compressed Binary Encoding (CBE) and a draft JSON encoding. X3D became the successor to the Virtual Re ...

). Over recent years, advances in real time graphics and networking technology, and most notably the emergence of the Extensible Markup Language

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. ...

, have heavily influenced the development of the ISO-approved, freely available, X3D open standard. X3D embodies best practices in commercial real time graphics within the widely adopted framework of the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

family of technologies and standards and has no intellectual property restrictions. It provides a system for the storage, retrieval and playback of real time graphics content embedded in applications, all within an

open architecture Open architecture is a type of computer architecture or software architecture intended to make adding, upgrading, and swapping components with other computers easy. For example, the IBM PC, Amiga 500 and Apple IIe have an open architecture suppor ...

to support a wide array of domains and user scenarios. Web3D applications have been active for some time. Previously known as the

Consortium, this community spearheaded the development of the VRML 1.0 and 2.0 specifications, which provide the basis for the development of associated applications. The organizations involved in this effort felt that the creation of an open consortium focused exclusively on Web3D would provide the structure necessary to stabilize, standardize, and nurture the technology for the entire community. Today, the Web3D Consortium is utilizing its broad-based industry support to develop the X3D specification as a successor to VRML for communicating 3D on the web, between applications and across distributed networks and web services. Related to its educational mission, the Consortium maintains an extensive website of documents and links related to VRML and X3D resources, including plugins and browsers from many long-term members and open source developers.

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Web3D Consortium

{{DEFAULTSORT:Web3d Consortium Computer graphics organizations Graphics standards ISO standards Markup languages Mountain View, California Virtual reality organizations

See also

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