WebGL

Terrain Service now integrated with WebGL Front-End

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The Terrain Service for ARIADNE infrastructure, has been integrated with the WebGL Front-End! – Have a quick look here for a live demo

That means in the output section, the user can now select “JSON Multi-Resolution” option to generate and publish online a paged, optimized multi-resolution dataset and explore the 3D terrain in all its glory, eventually presenting attached metadata. The server will take care of geometry optimization, OpenGL ES optimization, texture processing + compression and quad-tree paged structure for efficient streaming. This new feature will expand current Desktop segment output (common formats such as OBJ, 3DS, FBX and others) and remote rendering output for low-end devices (not yet supporting WebGL) thus covering a wide range in output section.

A new WebGL/HTML5 3D Front-End

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A flexible web component has been developed to publish multi-resolution 3D assets online and to explore them interactively on modern browsers. The Front-End (PHP + JavaScript) is based on osgjs, jQuery, Gunzip and modern HTML5/CSS capabilities. For those unfamiliar with the osgjs library, it’s the same javascript library used by SketchFab platform. Such component is conceived to interact with complex and multi-resolution 3D scenes, large 3D terrain datasets and items on both desktop and mobile browsers, while maintaining high performance through state-of-the-art organization (scene-graphs), resource management and paging techniques.

A quick glance at current main features:

  • SceneGraph based: hierarchical culling, instancing for efficient streaming, ease of composition and organization for complex scenes, efficient handling of spatial transformations, multiple nodes loading and much more…
  • Multi-texturing, paged multi-resolution, geometry and texture compression
  • Support for several peripherals out-of-the-box: mouse, keyboard, gamepad, LeapMotion and others
  • Multi-Touch enabled on desktop browsers and mobile devices (tablets and smartphones)
  • Easy embed in web pages
  • Support for metadata presentation through server-side or cross-server (external) XML files
  • Support for POV (Point-of-Views): management of camera transitions and navigation states, permalinks for easy sharing (QR-codes, etc.)
  • Support for Spherical Panoramas (equirectangular)
  • VR Support (experimental) for OculusRift 2