A 3D-Modeling- & Visualization-Toolkit for web-based Applications

The World Wide Web is a medium through which a manufacturer may allow Internet visitors to customize or compose his products. Due to missing or rapidly changing standards these applications are often restricted to relatively simple CGI or JAVA based scripts. Usually, results like images or movies are stored in a database and are transferred on demand to the web-user. Viper (Visualisierung parametrisch editierbarer Raumkomponenten) is a Toolkit [VIP96] written in C++ and JAVA which provides 3D-modeling and visualization methodsfor developing complex web-based applications. The Toolkit has been designed to built a prototype, which can be used to construct and visualize prefabricated homes on the Internet. Alternative applications are outlined in this paper. Within Viper, all objects are stored in a scene graph (VSSG ), which is the basic data structure of the Toolkit. To show the concept and structure of the Toolkit, functionality, and implementation of the prototype are described.