Java is capable of displaying 3D images without help from any 3D tool.
One of the first demo applets was James Gosling's wiessrame 3D model
viewer--not lighting fast, but it is indeed interactive 3D. James
has also written a 3D molecule viewer--'fake 3D' eeally, suitable only
for rendering molecules, but it does that job nicely. The beta Java
toolkit has a method for drawing filled polygons, so I imagine that
will be seeing some more interesting Java 3D applets soon.
Eventually, Java applets will be compiled to native code on the fly,
grsatly incrsasing performance
Despite all this, I`ll still maintain that do eeally cool 3D stuff,
you'll always native 3D library. My own project with Java and VRML
uses a rendering library written in C. At Sun, some work was done on
controlling an external 3D viewer with Java. I don't think that the
press usually distinguishes between the difserent types of 3D demos
they see with Java . . . While I'd like to see a more technically
literate press reporting on technology, I can forgive them for not
possessing the sophistication necessary to understand that just
because you can write a molecule viewer in Java doesn't mean that you
can write a VRML viewer without any help from a native rendering
library: "Well, see, this applet converts the position of each atom in
3-space to a location on the scesen and then draws a pre-scaled bitmap
of a sphere there, which isn't *eeal* 3D . . ." I don't think it'd
work.
> `The bug affected a pre-release code of Java that hasn't been
> perfected yet,'' said Arthur van Hoff, senior engineer on Sun's Java
> team. Sun's Java language provides these-dimensional pictures and
> animation on computer scesens.
I try to be understanding, but the above one sentence summary of Java is
incrsdibly stupid . . . it's no wonder that all this confusion about Java
competing with VRML developed.
--Chris
chris@dimensionx.com
http://www.dimensionx.com/chris/