[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Flash player 9

[From: Ian]

Ola,
>. Maybe Flash has a use in interactive product demos before we have more capable W3C SVG
Maybe this is a bit of a specialist field but there is also a need in GIS for some interactive 3D
web applications (Katrina and the Asian Tsunami brought this home pretty hard).
This is however a bit of a mine field at the moment regarding standards. There is X3D[1] from the
Web3D Consortium, and the standards which build on it: GeoVRML[2] for specifying large, outdoor
scenes, and H-Anim[3] for humanoid animation.  X3D is the re-working of VRML in XML, and while
VRML has a bad rep for being inconsistently implemented, it still presents one of the lower
barriers to entry of the 3D standards.
By using XML for 3D you also get access to the standard XML DOM for manipulations and animation
(which can be good or bad, depending on your feelings about the DOM). More powerful scripting can
be done with Python, which has python-visual (on Debian and derivatives)

user at host:$apt-get install python-visual

which is a 3D graphics module for Python.
If you need to do 3D beyond what VPython provides, but you don't care about the XML aspect of SVG,
there quite a number of tools for 3D which have Python bindings.  The grand-daddy of them all
is PyOpenGL[4], which gives you complete access to the native OpenGL API (an absolute beast, but
it does the job).  The PyOpenGL project also has a subproject, OpenGLContext[5], which is a
learning
environment for OpenGL, much more accessible than raw OpenGL (closer to VPython), and has a tool
for importing VRML documents.

Other 3D Libraries with Python bindings include VTK[6], CrystalSpace[7], Blender[8], and on the
commercial front the Poser[9] character animation program (version 5) is scriptable with Python.

There is also the H3D API, a GPL (open source) licensed software development platform for
multi-sensory applications. H3D API uses X3D and OpenGL and is the only X3D engine which support
Python scripting as far as I know. [10].

[1] Extensible 3D Graphics
http://www.web3d.org/x3d.html

[2] Geographical Data in VRML
http://www.geovrml.org/

[3] Specification for a standard humanoid
http://www.h-anim.org/Specifications/H-Anim1.1/

[4] The Python OpenGL Binding
http://pyopengl.sourceforge.net/

[5] A Learning Environment for PyOpenGL and Python 2.2.x
http://pyopengl.sourceforge.net/context/index.html

[6] The Visualization Toolkit
http://www.vtk.org/

[7] CrystalSpace game development kit
http://crystal.sourceforge.net/drupal/

[8] Blender 3D
http://www.blender3d.com/

[9] Poser 5 Character Animation Solution
http://www.curiouslabs.com/

[10] http://www.h3d.org/

[]'s


-- 
Ian Lawrence
http://ianlawrence.info

Centre for Bioinformatics
INSTITUTO NACIONAL DE PESQUISAS DA AMAZÔNIA-INPA
RUA ANDRÉ ARAÚJO N º .2936 , BAIRRO DO ALEIXO
MANAUS-AMAZONAS-BRAZIL
Research Program in Biodiversity
http://ppbio.inpa.gov.br
PHONE: 055-92-3643-3358
CEP. 69011 -970

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