COLLADA Contest Winners From Siggraph 2009

An anonymous reader writes "COLLADA — the group creating open 3D data standards — announced their latest contest winners at Siggraph 2009. Ordinarily this wouldn't interest me, but the grand prize winner, NaviCAD, really did submit something rather interesting — an iPhone app that lets you explore Google 3D Warehouse models. Of course there's the pinching for zooming in/out, but it also uses the motion sensor to control the view. If you are walking around the inside or outside of a building, as you look around in the real world the view on the iPhone displays the corresponding view."

Comments

Re:iphone only?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just as with the "Augmented reality" story the other day this sort of thing is available on Android too, and was before it was available with the iPhone, but Slashdot is so horrifically full of Apple zealots it's apparently only news when the iPhone does it.

That's also the reason this post will almost certainly get modded down, but at least this should answer you question. If you want to know what cool apps are going to be coming out for the iPhone, pay attention to the cool apps that are already out for Android and iPhone developers will soon copy them and pass them off as their new iPhone exclusive inventions.

Boring.

[pavon]

Ordinarily this wouldn't interest me, but the grand prize winner, NaviCAD, really did submit something rather interesting â" an iPhone app

WTF? This has to be the least interesting thing related to Siggraph ever. I'm sure they did a good job designing it for the platform, but it's just a fucking model viewer.

Re:Boring.

[eulernet]

I totally agree.
Not possessing an iPhone, I don't see the point of such an application (I have seen tons of 3D viewers on so much platforms).

BTW, their application is not free (sold on AppStore), and they'll probably license it to Apple.

The second prize seems a lot more impressive: http://3d.athens-agora.gr/index_en.html

Shouldn't these prizes reward people that don't write commercial applications ?

Re:Boring.

[UnanimousCoward]

Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers of this app.

I tried to submit a story on our app to /. pointing out some of the technical challenges on developing a complex-model 3D app on the iPhone thinking that this angle would be appreciated by the /. crowd, but it wasn't accepted. When I saw this submission come out, I have no doubt that comments would be critical with respect to the contest.

The main challenges included the fixed memory footprint and the relatively slow processor (all of us iPhone developers dream of performance equal to that of the simulator). Perhaps we will try and submit a technical article to the likes of Ars Technica and see how that's received.

Yes it's just a [insert your choice of bad word here] model viewer, but like other technologies, we threw spaghetti against the wall just to showcase possibilities for the platform. We have several 'practical' applications in the works that probably won't merit an accepted submission here :-)

performance

[edxwelch]

I wonder how well that performs? Collada is rather bulky because it is designed as an intermediate format. You would normally convert it into a more steamlined binary format before actually using it in an app.

Re:performance

[daemonburrito]

Collada is a bit bulky. But it kind of has to be that way achieve the design goal of being a lossless intermediate format. It really can describe just about anything 3d.

However, apps like this one only use a small subset Collada. And performance isn't that much of an issue; the convenience of xml leads to interesting things like the <NetworkLink> element in kml, which can actually increase performance by loading models on demand from the server based on the view.

So yeah...you'd use a binary format in a traditional app, but Collada is totally useful for network apps.

On the other hand, omg does the documentation suck... And spitting out valid Collada dynamically is a giant PITA (full disclosure: working on a kml/dae project at the moment). Sony's C++ DOM api and FCollada seem to work okay, but don't help those of us who don't have cgi as an option.

It would be nice if Kronos has somebody else handle the Collada website and forums (which are a joke), and produce documentation just for the small subset of the standard used by GIS apps.

Re:performance

[UnanimousCoward]

Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers for this app.

Parsing the XML on the iPhone platform does take some time. In an update (waiting for approval from Apple), we will be serializing the model on the client so at least on second viewing, the model loads much faster. In a later update, we may do the serialization on the server and just serve up the serialized model to the client.