Animation on the web: a survey <s> Conclusion <s> This article presents and discusses the implementation of a direct volume rendering system for the Web, which articulates a large portion of the rendering task in the client machine. By placing the rendering emphasis in the local client, our system takes advantage of its power, while at the same time eliminates processing from unreliable bottlenecks (e.g. network). The system developed articulates in efficient manner the capabilities of the recently released WebGL standard, which makes available the accelerated graphic pipeline (formerly unusable). The dependency on specially customized hardware is eliminated, and yet efficient rendering rates are achieved. The Web increasingly competes against desktop applications in many scenarios, but the graphical demands of some of the applications (e.g. interactive scientific visualization by volume rendering), have impeded their successful settlement in Web scenarios. Performance, scalability, accuracy, security are some of the many challenges that must be solved before visual Web applications popularize. In this publication we discuss both performance and scalability of the volume rendering by WebGL ray-casting in two different but challenging application domains: medical imaging and radar meteorology. <s> BIB001 </s> Animation on the web: a survey <s> Conclusion <s> Animations are frequently used and beneficial for different scenarios in information visualization [Robertson et al. 2008; Kriglstein et al. 2012]. The X3D format [ISO and IEC 2008] provides a sound basis to create information visualizations and animations, but its concept of routes, interpolators and sensors for animating elements has some weaknesses. A major problem is that X3D has no built-in event-based mechanism to trigger reusable complex animations. The widespread use of the event-based approach in web technology shows, that it is an efficient concept adaptable to different needs. The lack of such a mechanism in X3D makes it difficult in some scenarios to create animated and interactive scenes. This paper will show a concept capable of solving these problems in X3D and the implementation of the concept as a framework. The framework helps to create dynamic information visualization scenes and makes it possible to create and combine reusable animations. Furthermore the framework provides ways to trigger these animations at given times to orchestrate the animations of a scene. The triggering mechanism also has the advantage to separate the animations from the static aspects of a scene. <s> BIB002 </s> Animation on the web: a survey <s> Conclusion <s> The visualization of massive 3D models is an intensively examined field of research. Due to their rapidly growing complexity of such models, visualisation them in real-time will never be possible through a higher speed of rasterization alone. Instead, a practical solution has to reduce the amount of data to be processed, using a fast visibility determination. In recent years, the combination of Javascript and WebGL raised attention for the possibility of rendering hardware-accelerated 3D graphics directly in the browser. However, when compared to desktop applications, they are still fighting with their disadvantages of a generally slower execution speed, or a downgraded set of functionality. We demonstrate the integration of spatial data structures, computed on the client side, using latest technology trends to mitigate the shortcomings of the 3D Web environment. We employ comparably small bounding volume hierarchies to accelerate our visibility determination, as well as to enable specific culling techniques. This allows for an interactive visualization of such massive 3D data sets. Our in-depth analysis of different data structures and environments shows which combination of data structure and visibility determination techniques are currently the best fit for the Web. <s> BIB003 </s> Animation on the web: a survey <s> Conclusion <s> Given that physics can be fundamental for realistic and interactive Web3D applications, a number of JavaScript versions of physics engines have been introduced during the past years. This paper presents the implementation of the rigid body physics component, as defined by the X3D specification, in the X3DOM environment, and the creation of dynamic 3D interactive worlds. We briefly review the state of the art in current technologies for Web3D graphics, including HTML5, WebGL and X3D, and then explore the significance of physics engines in building realistic Web3D worlds. We include a comprehensive review of JavaScript physics engine libraries, and proceed to summarize the significance of our implementation while presenting in detail the methodology followed. The results obtained so far from our cross-browser experiments demonstrate that real-time interactive scenes with hundreds of rigid bodies can be constructed and operate with acceptable frame rates, while the allowing the user to maintain the scene control. <s> BIB004
We have presented an overview of the state of animation over the web and the open challenges present in the context. It is clear that WebGL as graphical platform and web browsers as a common viewport present seamless prospects for graphics over the web. With the new working draft of these standards, any or all barriers for real time rendering are fast diminishing. But it is also clear that there is a need for a common, structured, encoding-agnostic and stream able standard for animated content over the web. Most of the current techniques are built upon a few seminal works which have approached the problem in diverse ways. For example, one general approach tries to decimate the mesh data based on the connectivity, geometry, and using a spatial data structure for traversal. While other approaches are more geared towards efficient rendering on the client side. Moreover, there is surprisingly little work done on bringing real time animation on the web, most of it has been focused on transmitting static 3D mesh objects. Nonetheless, there is a lot of research done recently concerning WebGL and rendering objects on the web BIB001 BIB002 BIB003 BIB004 . WebGL 2.0 promises to bring many more features to the table, and there are several interesting avenues that need to be explored, such as using the GPU to parallelize the computing process (on the browser), protecting intellectual data post-transmission, and efficient reproduction of the animation data. Fortunately, the landscape on the web is soon catching up with the state of the art and promises to bring exciting new features with broadening horizons.