Interactive 3D Graphics Applications Embedded in Web Pages

As Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) are becoming more and more popular, there is an increasing demand for new web services and developments. In particular, there is a need of new technologies (often referred to as Web3D) to create and manipulate interactive three-dimensional (3D) environments on the Web. A major problem in this subject is the lack of specialized 3D graphics libraries for Internet, with similar functionalities to those of OpenGL for standalone applications. Although several APIs (Java3D, GJ4JAVA, JOGL, LWJGL, jGL) have been proposed to tackle this issue, none of them has become an official part of core Java package so far. Consequently, it is still hard to build reliable Internet-oriented 3D graphics programs providing the web users with the same realism and interactivity usually found on standalone applications. This paper proposes a based-on-Java framework to develop interactive 3D graphics applications embedded in web pages. Our approach is not based on the development of new programming tools, the emphasis being placed upon the careful selection of already existing technologies (also described in this paper) that provide the best results for our goals along with the optimized design of the workflow. Some applications aimed at showing the potential of our approach are also briefly reported.