When I started programming a few years ago, one of my first projects was linked to a project for school. Our team was making a presentation, and at some point I decided I wanted to program it myself, for the web. This resulted in the version of a project which, to this day, doesn't have a name (but soon will have).
After a few months I wanted to expand this. With some research and trial and error in the area of CSS 3D Transforms, I made a program similar to impress.js. Regular slides, in the web, in 3D, but with some unique things. Of course, it wasn't as refined yet, but this was only the start.
These unique things[1] were 3D models, that you can view in your very own web browser. This on its own isn't that unique; There are plenty of libraries that do that, like A-Frame and xml3d. The special thing of my 3D models are that they're pure HTML and CSS. No canvas or WebGL needed, just a relatively modern browser. This opens a whole range of possibilities: viewing HTML structures and CSS styles in your default debugger; selecting text directly from the model; embedding audio, video, pages and anything else you can put in HTML; and, of course, the possibility to combine these models and the slides, as they use CSS 3D Transforms as well.
There are some disadvantages to this. HTML+CSS only allows for 2D elements, so to make a cube, you'd need 6 elements, a wrapper element and 10+ lines of CSS. And if you want to change the height, you need to change that one value in a lot of places. To solve that, I've started developing SVM, which stands for Scalable Vector (3D) Models. The name is very similar to SVG, and that's how I intended it: XML-based, simple, and with lots of built-in shapes.
The first (beta) version is still in development, but I can list some of the features:
- Built-in solids: Cubes, cuboids, regular prisms, cylinders (to an extent), regular pyramids, regular right frustums, cones (to an extent), irregular convex and concave prisms using SVG Paths (!), and simple spheres
- Planes, arcs, SVG Path-based curves
- Groups (with names)
- Transformation (translation, rotation, scaling) on any element (or at least the currently existing ones)
- An element to include groups/components
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| Some of the features in action, including automatic shadow, which will adapt to the orientation of the elements in the future[2] |
It may not be as refined yet, but I think there's a lot of potential. Currently, the main hurdle is performance and the accompanying visual issues. For example, on my laptop, Chrome starts lagging and breaking apart[3] at around 450 elements, and keep in mind that even a single cube results in six elements. Also keep in mind: it works fine for up to around 1200 elements on my PC.
[1]: As far as I know, anyway.
[2]: Currently, it doesn't, as you can see on the yellow cylinder next to the red cube.
[3]:
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| As you can see, parts of elements just disappear |
