3D Rendering

with Pure Java

Visual and Geometric Computing

What can we do with 3D rendering in an environment with limited resources? Until Java chips become widely available, Java will be inherently slower than native code; and pure Java can't rely on graphics libraries or hardware for speed. We wondered how fast we could render under these restrictions.

We were pleasantly surprised. Our first results were very encouraging. By combining our own rendering engine with IBM's MPEG4 mesh compression technology, we achieved remarkably good performance both for download and interactive rendering. So we looked for applications.

Our first application is IBM's HotMedia. HotMedia is an award-winning tool for small multimedia presentations on the web. It supports a wide variety of media and allows them to be linked together into a unified experience. HotMedia 3D imports VRML2 models. We're adding new features for future releases and tuning the rendering engine for better performance.

IBM HotMedia site

Recent research offers a variety of new techniques for rendering 3D models too large for the computing environment. We're investigating which of these techniques are best suited for our applications. The approaches we've taken in our Java renderer are equally applicable to other small computing environments; we're experimenting with some of the same techniques to provide 3D graphics for mobile computing.

Researchers working on this project include Josh Mittleman and Gabriel Taubin.

Last updated: October 30, 2000