Sandy Ressler from the NIST, attended the Web3D 2006 Symposium on April 18-21. He recently wrote an open letter to the X3D Public List reviewing his experience.

" I haven’t seen anyone post anything about the Web3D 2006 Symposium last week so I’ll just add my impressions. I was unbelievably pleasantly surprised. I had honestly thought for quite some time that the conference should probably be postponed a year and that it would just turn out to be the usual suspects with incrementally improved demos and papers. Au contraire! The papers were damn good and really showed a high degree of maturation to the field."

"X3D is still too complicated but the VRML/X3D browsers out there are really beginning to look good!

In particular both the bitmanagement and Xj3D browsers are really showing some impressive capabilities.

Shaders are making these things look like they belong to graphics from this century and the ability to interact with a lot of stuff at once is finally bringing the graphics quality up to snuff."

"I have to mention one paper in particular...Herbert Stocker from Bitmanagement presented a talk on his paper innocuously titled_ "Linear Filters - Animating Objects in a Flexible and Pleasing Way". Stocker presented the whole talk using a customized version of BS Contact that implemented the new nodes he had designed. The entire talk consisted of 3D examples of him using these new nodes which allow for highly dynamic animations that respond to the user’s actions. Little balls follow the cursor and objects respond and animate all over the screen. It was the most impressive 3D talk I’ve seen in years!"

"What was most impressive to me was that it was clearly implemented in a rock solid browser. We’ve been putting together VRML animations that respond to user actions for years but they always seem to have nasty boundary conditions and jerky responses for example using a VCR type of control to control the animation and move it forward or reverse and so on. There are always problems. The Stocker presentations was completely solid and responded in exactly the way one would expect and there were no glitches whatsoever."

"Maybe this 3D stuff is actually going to work ;-)"