1 Using Voxelization and Ray-Tracing to Identify Wall Thinness of ...

changing. Stability and longevity are key; one might describe X3D as a conservative, non-hastylanguage. In an effort to avoid deprecation of feature sets, the Web3D Consortium make it a goalto minimize language bloat and are slow to introduce a rash of new functionality. This givesemerging 3D concepts a chance to sort themselves out before they are absorbed into the nextX3D iteration.The specification, being an ISO-ratified standard, is very well documented. The actualX3D itself is also easy to parse: The format of is highlyrecognizable to those familiar with XML encoding. The data itself is nothing more complicatedthan tags and strings, as demonstrated in figure 4. X3D gives us the ability to describe geometryat a very high level of abstraction (should we so desire). For instance, to describe spheregeometry, one need only write: . The standard unit of measure inthe specification is the meter, so this would describe a sphere with a radius of 2 meters. Just asone would expect, when viewed in a browser one would see a round sphere (though one couldn'tnecessarily determine the sphere's size without seeing its size relative to another object in the 3Dscene).The following figure shows another X3D file, which would produce nearly identicalresults when viewed in the same browser: a round sphere would appear on the screen. Note theradical difference in the two files, however, and realize that the image below has been truncatedto save space:11