Is Mozilla Pushing a New 3D Standard?

This past week the web standards organization Khronos Group (the folks responsible for management of the OpenGL standards) announced a partnership with Mozilla that will aim to create a new open standard for ‘accelerated 3D on the web’.

The announcement generated quite a bit of buzz and commentary in the online graphics community. John Dowdell of Adobe wrote a highly critical blog post on the announcement titled "Standards for thee, but not for me". The crux of John's message seems to be that there are already open standards for Web3D (VRML, X3D) and several open and functional browser-based rendering engines. After reading this post, I could see John's point. What's a standard worth if it can be so easily disregarded? But further investigation into matter showed that what Mozilla is proposing is quite different from these existing standards.

While VRML and X3D provide a common vocabulary and standard schema for structuring Web3D data, the Khronos/Mozilla group will work to standardize the way in which this type of data is delivered via the Web. The current leading idea seems to be an interface based on JavaScript (plugin-less!) that would allow direct access to OpenGL rendering functions. This means that VRML and X3D would remain a viable way to organize and store your data and the new standard would provide a common method for the rendering side of the equation.

A CNet article provides a little more info and points out that Adobe is currently looking at incorporating 3D into their Flash-plugin as well....coincidence?

In the end, I think this partnership sounds like it has great promise. It remains to be seen if and when and results would be seen, but the ideas are solid. N Formation Design has long held that a plugin-less content delivery system is the only way to provide viable Web3D. A common, open, hardware-accelerated standard for this would be huge. We'll hope for the best!

3D Captcha

Most everyone these days who has participated any sort of web-service is familiar with the Captcha. It's the (usually) annoying little set of disfigured letters or words that you must decode and type into a box to assure that system that you are, indeed, a human being. Weeding out traffic from hackers and bots is a necessity so that the providers of these automated services can dedicate their time and resources to serving real users. While the current common Captcha system has helped in this respect, it has put an unnecessary additional load on users (Does it ever work right the first time?) and is not foolproof.

The conceptualization and implementation of a new 3D Captcha system promises both an easier and more reliable solution as well as highlighting a new niche for 3D on the web. Instead of identifying words or letters, users would have to choose images that match with a randomly generated view of a 3D object.

From the CNET article:

The challenge is a 3D image of an animal, say of a rabbit's face. The list of answers would display different common animals from different angles, including a photo of the rabbit, this time of its side. Only a human brain would be able to quickly see that the challenge image and the second image on the answer list are of the same animal. Now you just need to click on the correct second image to pass the challenge.

The system relies on the human brain's ability to easily identify different views of a complex 3D object as being the same object. An algorithm can be created to automatically process a text-based Captcha image and try to translate the symbols found into the finite set of available letter, number, and symbol characters. The more disfigured the symobls, the harder for the algorithm to process, but also harder for the human to process! This 3D solution greatly simplifies the ordeal for users while exponentially increasing the difficulty of automating a hack.

What a creative and elegant solution to a complex problem! Three cheers for evolution! :)