Development of 3D graphics and VRML libraries for Web3D platform by using Java

This paper proposes a new 3D graphics programming environment for Web3D on the Internet. To develop 3D graphics programs on the Internet is not easy because there is no popular 3D graphics library like OpenGL. For this purpose, we developed a 3D graphics library called jGL by using Java exclusively. jGL is a general-purpose 3D graphics library, and its API (Application Programming Interface) is defined in a manner quite similar to that of OpenGL. Since jGL offers the same functionalities as OpenGL, programmers can use it easily. Furthermore, since people have recently been able to use simple Java programs on cellular phones, migration experimentation toward i-αppli is also described in this paper. Moreover, VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) is a standard file format for describing 3D models on the Internet. To display a 3D model on the Internet, people may like to use the VRML file format. Therefore, we also developed a VRML library called jVL by using Java exclusively as an extension of jGL. In this paper, the results and some detailed descriptions are updated compared with those in Ref. 3. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 34(10): 47–55, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.10393