Introduction

This is an extension and update of the Introduction for 19775-1:2014. This section contains only original material.

General

Extensible 3D (X3D) V4 is a software standard for defining interactive web- and broadcast-based 3D content integrated with multimedia. X3D is intended for use on a variety of hardware devices and in a broad range of application areas such as engineering and scientific visualization, multimedia presentations, entertainment and educational titles, web pages, and shared virtual worlds. X3D is also intended to be a universal interchange format for integrated 3D graphics and multimedia. X3D is the evolutaionary successor to X3D V3 and the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), the original ISO standard for web-based 3D graphics (ISO/IEC 14772). X3D V4 improves upon X3D V3 with full standardized integration with HTML5 and Document Object Model (DOM) environments, new features, advanced application programmer interfaces, additional data encoding formats, stricter conformance, and a componentized architecture that allows for a modular approach to supporting the standard.

This section provides a background to the design objectives behind the development of X3D, an overview of the features of X3D and a description of the X3D specification process.

Design objectives

X3D has been developed and enhanced to meet a specific set of market and technical requirements. To meet these requirements, X3D has adopted the following design objectives:

• Run in an HTML5 environment with a downloadable library for parsing, processing, and display of the 3D content
• Compatible with workflows in 3D development
• Other design objectives as listed in the V3.3 Introduction

Features as listed in the V3.3 Introduction

For a complete list of X3D features, consult the component descriptions in clauses 7 through 40 of this part of ISO/IEC 19775.