Demo: An X3D Extension for Declarative 3D Style Sheets Jérôme Royan Orange Labs jerome.royan@orange.com Noémie Esnault Regards noemie.esnault@groupe-regards.com ABSTRACT This paper presents a demonstration of an interactive 3D video on demand catalogue based on an innovative extension proposal to the X3D standard for 3D style sheets represen- tation (X3DSS). This extension provides Web3D designers with a declarative way to build groundbreaking 3D graphical user interfaces (3DGUI) for Web3D. Thanks to new nodes allowing accessing a well-structured set of contents, the so- lution we propose offers many benefits. Indeed, this X3D ex- tension takes advantage of both 3D declarative formats and style sheets. Firstly, the presented solution provides web3D designers with all essential features of X3D for building in- novative 3DGUIs. Secondly, the extension brings the key features of a style sheet that enable the separation of the presentation and interaction semantics from the document content, well-suited for dynamic contents and presentation reusability. X3D based 3D style sheet offers a high level declarative representation pooling both requirements of the Web and 3D graphics community. Categories and Subject Descriptors I.3.6 [Methodology and Techniques]: Standards—Lan- guages ; I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism—Virtual Reality Keywords Web-based interactions, Graphical User Interfaces, Multi- media databases, Languages and structures 1. INTRODUCTION A wide range of use cases could benefit of 3DGUIs on the Web, essentially when Web services consist in present- ing a huge amount of multimedia contents (video, music or photo catalogues, art pieces, consumer items for v-shopping, navigation within open data, etc). Well-designed 3D graph- ical and interaction user interfaces can ease the navigation Copyright c 2012 for the individual papers by the papers’ authors. Copy- ing permitted only for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors. Dec3D2012 workshop at WWW2012, Lyon, France . within a huge amount of multimedia contents while improv- ing the user experience. Firstly, the CSS3 based 3DGUIs such as carousels, image cubes or walls, already become a usual way to present a set of images or videos within web pages. But more promising 3D presentations can revolution- ize the next generation of the Web by providing users with a greater experience of navigation and interaction. However, the usability of 3DGUIs, in terms of navigation and interaction, is mainly related to the presentation meta- phor. The design of such new 3DGUIs requires efficient tools to give designers with free rein to their creativity. The stan- dard file formats VRML and X3D, that have inspired most of 3D formats, offers graphic designers a declarative way fully suitable for hardware graphic acceleration to define 3D virtual applications. Moreover, related works proposed so- lutions to automatically build 3D scenes presenting external data sets such as a virtual museum with X-VRML [4], or curricula for chemistry [2] and education [3] based on XSLT. More recently, Esnault et al. has presented a 3D style sheet language offering more reusability well-suited Web require- ments [1]. The following demonstration is based on an X3D extension specification of this last related work. 2. 3D STYLE SHEETS 2.1 Overview Figure 1: 3D style sheet pipeline The X3D extension for 3D style sheet aims to provide an efficient solution to define attractive and customized presen- tation metaphors for huge database visualization. Figure 1 shows the full pipeline strongly inspired by Web authoring tools. A content manager extracts the required information from an input database (a video on demand catalogue) and