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* 3PM - 3D in the Browser... More than just Doom (Catherine Leung, Seneca College)
I'm going to discuss the two talks which are the most closely related to my project in this course which were the Twitter widget in processing.js and the 3D in the browser with canvas and whats being done with these technologies. I will then do a comparison on how these two talks related to each other. Finally I give my views on open source and a summary of my experience at FSOSS.
== Creating a Twitter Widget using Processing.js ==
Having just recently switched my major project to work on processing.js I decided this was one presentation I could not miss out on. This talk was given by Al MacDonald who is a freelance web consultant. His website is [http://hyper-metrix.com/ Hyper-Metrix.com]. Al began his talk with an introduction into what [http://processingjs.org processing.js ] is. He explained that processing is a language for creating 2D and 3D graphics, animations, and interactive applications.<br />
[http://www.processing.org Processing ] is a language that was built to be run and parsed on a native JAVA client. So processing 'sketches' would be created and then run on the JAVA client which would process them and create the graphics, animations, text, etc in a window. Then a man by the name of [http://ejohn.org/ John Resig ] came into the picture and started work on creating a port of processing for JAVA to processing for JavaScript. The idea was to be able to allow those sketches of animations, graphics, and interactive apps to be able to be drawn in a web browser without any plugins or extensions to install. Simply put a way to animate and 'interactify' the web and allow processing creations to 'just work' in modern browsers for users.<br />
After a brief intro into what PJS was and how it got started Al got into some code samples and showed some real time examples of making some simple demos. He showed how easy it is to get started and do some really neat things and basic animations with just a few lines of code. Following some code samples and demos he showed how some of the different parts of processing.js work and some examples of contributions that some of the students in our course have made.<br />
== 3D in the Browser... More than just Doom ==
This presentation was given by [http://cleung.wordpress.com/ Catherine Leung] who is a professor at Seneca College in the School of Computer Studies, where she teaches in the game development and programming areas. Cathy's talk was about a project she has been working on called [http://www.c3dl.org c3DLC3DL]. C3DL is a JavaScript library that will provide a set of classes for rendering 3D objects in the browser. Currently it requires an up to date browser such as Firefox 3.5 in order to run. Canvas 3D is available as an add-on for Firefox 3.5 or higher and can be downloaded at [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=Canvas+3d&cat=all addons.mozilla.org]. Cathy demonstrated an application called Motionview which allows previewing of raw down sampled motion capture data in the browserby using the C3DL library. Motionview was developed through a partnership between [http://navarra.ca/ The purpose of Motionview is to reduce Navarra Group], [http://www.bedlamgames.com/ Bedlam Games], [http://www.coredp.com/ CORE], and Seneca College and was supported by the expensive cost of 'clean up' in motion capture animation scenes when sometimes certain points in the animation are wrong[http://www.omdc.on.ca/site11.aspx Ontario Media Development Corporation].<br />
Motion capture is a technology that uses a special suit with reflective balls attached to key movement points on the object you want to animate, usually a human. Cameras from multiple angles capture the location of the reflective balls as they move around and the computer processes the data from the different cameras to build a skeleton of the object. Sometimes the cameras get it wrong though and the model needs to be cleaned up and corrected. The purpose of Motionview is to reduce the expensive cost of 'clean up' in motion capture animation scenes when sometimes certain points in the animation are wrong. Because of the high cost of producing motion capture video this data is never sent out in a raw format over the web, instead the C3DL library is used with the application which reads a converted format of the raw motion data and displays it in the browser for artists to preview which shots they want to use and mark which shots to be cleaned up instead of everything. This results in a huge cost savings.<br />
Cathy moved on to show a few other demos such as particle systems and a 3D Google maps road view demo that could simulate turns in a route on Google maps. She also showed a really cool animation of some 3D panels that act as links to websites with logos orbiting around a c3dl logo which were clickable to visit the website. Once a panel had been clicked it would display a sepia effect to show it had been visited before.<br />
For more information on C3DL you can visit [http://www.c3dl.org/ their website]. They have a [http://www.c3dl.org/index.php/tutorials/ section on tutorials] as well for installing the Canvas 3D addon, basic modeling, light effects, etc. Their development news can be found [http://www.c3dl.org/index.php/development-news/ here].
=Comparisons=Requirements==The most obvious comparison that can be observed from these two talks is how new strides are being made in the ability to create highly enriched content for the web. The ties of these two projects to open source is also something to take notice of. Both of these projects rely on an open source community to help contribute, test, develop for , and maintain. Both presenters focused on the importance of community in open source projects, the ability for people to give back to the community to keep it healthy, and on how taking part in the community helps raise awareness for these projects which will ultimately create a richer and fuller web experience for everyone.<br />