VSRD International Journal of Mechanical, Civil, Automobile and Production Engineering, Vol.

VIII Issue VMay 2018 / 141

e-ISSN: 2249-8303, p-ISSN: 2319-2208 © VSRD International Journals: www.vsrdjournals.com

RESEARCH PAPER

CONVERSION PROCESS OF VRML (VIRTUAL REALITY MODELING

LANGUAGE) TO HTML5 (WEBGL)
1Dipak
Vinayak Shirbhate* and 2Dilip Sahebrao Ingole
1Principal,
Shri Dadasaheb Gaval Charitable Trust’s Vikramshila Polytechnic,
Amravati, Maharashtra, INDIA.
2Professor, Mechanical Engineering Department

Prof. Ram Meghe Institute of Technology & Research, Amravati, Maharashtra, INDIA.
*Corresponding Author Email ID: dipakshirbhate@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
In this paper author uses a method to convert a VRML file into a WebGL rendered scene through an offline application that is capable
of rendering this uploaded VRML file within the Web browser itself without any plug-ins being installed. It also describes the online
conversion tool. The conversion process between the input VRML file and the WebGL using offline commands which take the VRML
file as a source file and convert it into the HTML file. The nodes are then converted into scene graph nodes used for the scene creation.
A scene tree is then initialized and populated using these nodes containing their info and sent to the proposed dynamic WebGL
template. Finally, a new HTML5 file is created and displayed on the user's Web browser. An extensive set of experiments are
conducted to show the process of the offline conversion.

Keywords: X3D, VRML, WebGL, HTML5, Offline Converter, 3D Vector Graphics, Web-based Graphics Library.

1. INTRODUCTION
X3D is an open standard for 3D content delivery. It is
not a programming API, not just a file format for
geometry interchange. It joins both geometry and run-
time behavioral descriptions into a single file in a
number of different file formats available for it,
including the Extensible Markup Language (XML). It is
the next version of the VRML97 ISO specification,
integrating the new search in commercial graphics
hardware features including architectural improvements
based on years of feedback from the VRML97
development community.
The aim of X3D is to provide an interoperable platform
for real-time, interactive virtual environments over the
network. This goal is realized by suite of ISO
specifications that support the portability,
interoperability and continuity of digital assets. For
example, these specifications include the declarative
characterization of interactive scenes in various
encodings (XML, utf-8, binary) as well as an event-
based API for integration with other languages.
HTML5is a markup language used for structuring and
displaying content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth
and current major version of the HTML standard.
HTML5 includes detailed processing models to
encourage more interoperable enforcements; it enlarges,
improves and rationalizes the markup available for
documents, and introduces markup and application
programming interfaces (APIs) for complicated web.[6]
For this reasons, HTML5 is also a campaigner for cross-
platform mobile applications, because it incorporates
features designed with low-powered devices in mind.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
This section discusses some related work about
conversion mediums available for VRML TO HTML5.
Fatma Ziwar and Rimon Elias [1]. In this paper authors
have proposed the method of conversion by web-based
application. In this paper, the first-ever VRML-WebGL
converter is created. It performs the conversion between
3D virtual world graphics written in a VRML file and
WebGL, thus allowing these 3Dgraphics to be drawn
and rendered directly on the Web without using
additional plug-in or file viewer. This paper focus on a
conversion technique that is capable of editing a WebGL
template by sending the parameters and objects of the
requested graphics to be included in the HTML5 context
of the output Web page.
The application applies the different requested
operations onto the requested objects. It does data
acquisition, processing and conversion process between
VRML and WebGL contexts. Also a file viewer is called
to view the VRML input file graphical output on the
Web browser to compare the two graphical outputs.
3. PROBLEM STATEMENT
VRML is an easy to write modeling language used to
represent Scalable Vector Graphics. These graphics
could be then viewed on a standalone application like a
player or a viewer or onto a Web browser by using an
additional plug-in. On the contrary, the main
functionality for using WebGL is to represent SVG
directly onto the Web browser. Unfortunately, there is
Dipak Vinayak Shirbhate and Dilip Sahebrao Ingole
no tool to convert from VRML to WebGL. Thus, Fatma
Ziwar and Rimon Elias created converter to help in
filling the gap of the conversion between VRML and
WebGL. In this paper, the first-ever VRML-WebGL
converter is presented and discussed (Section III).Not
only the WebGL written inside the JavaScript context
helped in this conversion but also the new features
available in HTML5 and the new open source modern
Web browsers that support WebGL . They succeeded in
developing a conversion technique that is capable of
successfully editing a WebGL template by sending the
extracted parameters and objects of the requested
graphics to be included in theHTML5 context of the
output Web page. Being a Web-based application, it can
run directly onto the Web browser page, and could run
on wider range of hardware and operating systems
platforms; so, it can be used by more developers and/or
users.
But, this technique uses a continuous internet connection
and requires a time to convert the file. So in this paper an
offline method of conversion of VRML to HTML5 is
suggested.
4. PROPOSED WORK
OVERVIEW: Until recently, Web browsers were not
able to directly draw graphics on the Web without using
additional plug-ins like Flash, or file viewers. Rendering
rich computer 3D graphics directly on a Web page was a
dream of many developers. But, as the Hyper Text
Markup Language fifth major version (HTML5) arises it
came up with the help for solving this problem, by
having the canvas element embedded into its context.
Thus graphics can be rendered without any helper
programs, Java applet or even the usage of an additional
plug-in, only by using the Canvas and Scalable Vector
Graphics (SVG) elements. The usage of HTML5 and
additional scripts like JavaScript containing WebGL
running on an Internet-connected computer and a
WebGL enabled browser allows for faster drawing
graphics onto the Web permitting the generation of 3D
graphics and for automated memory management [1].
Currently there are many modern Web browsers that
support WebGL, for example: Google Chrome, Mozilla
Firefox, Safari, Opera and recently Internet
Explorer IEII [2].Software converter applications can be
Web-based applications in which the user or the
developer can have its access through the Web browser
being used directly, or as a stand-alone computer
program. An existing stand-alone VRML converter
applications example: Ayam which is a free open source
3D modeling environment [3] used to export and import
files written in a way that can be read by human easily.
These files are known for the Render Man Interface
Bytestream (RIB) files. To render the scenes modeled by
Ayam, a Render Man compliant renderer is required
to978-1-4799-5807-8/14/$31.00 @2014 IEEE being
VSRDIJMCAPE, Vol. VIII (V) May2018 / 142
installed. Example of Web-based converter applications
include VRML Merge that runs as a Java applet inside
the Web browser, a command line tool, or as a desktop
application [4] and it is used to convert VRML'97 files
to X3D files. Other examples include Instant reality X3D
encoding converter that allows the developer to produce
new applications and virtual worlds by modeling and not
just programming.
5. PROPOSED METHODOLOGY
This section discusses the flow of proposed methods for
converting VRML to html5.After conversion it
integrates 3D content seamlessly into our webpage - the
scene is directly written into the HTML markup. It
eliminates the plug-in requirement to view VRML file
on the web. There are two methods of converting VRML
code to X3DOM (HTML5).
 Online Conversion
 Offline Conversion
Online conversion:
START
Open the
Type following url
http://doc.instantreality.org/tools/x3d_enc
oding_converter/
Select the Encoding as
Copy and Paste the VRML code into the
Choose output encoding as HTML5
Click on Convert Encoding Button
STOP
Offline conversion:
The second method (offline conversion) is called
Transcoding. If you have VRML file, you can easily
recode your data without any data loss. There are
different options but the easiest right now is the Avalon-
Optimizer (aopt) from the Instant Reality packages.
Dipak Vinayak Shirbhate and Dilip Sahebrao Ingole VSRDIJMCAPE, Vol. VIII (V) May2018 / 143

Download and install the Instant Player system. The  aopt -iinput.wrl -x output.x3d
package includes a command line tool  To Convert VRML or X3D-XML directly to HTML
called aopt(.exe) which we will use for conversion. use the command
Setup your shell-environment to find and include the  aopt -i input.x3d -N output.html
binary. The usually paths are:  To Convert VMRL or X3D-XML to XHTML use
the command
Windows: C:\Program Files\Instant  aopt -i input.x3d -M output.xhtml
Player\bin\aopt.exe
 To convert VRML file which has tag <Inline>,
Various aopt commands: generally we use "-u” in command for Optimization.
run "aopt -h" to get a full list of commands.  aopt -i input.x3d -u -N output.html
 To Convert VRML directly to X3D-XML use the
command

START

Open the browser.

Type following url

http://www.instantreality.org/downloads/

Download and install the Instant Player

Go to Start All Programs Accessories Command Prompt

Change the default path of command prompt to

C:\Program Files\Instant Reality\bin\

Now place input .wrl file into the bin folder itself
that we want to convert.

Type the command in command prompt

to convert file as below and press Enter.
aopt -i VW2.wrl -N VW2.html

STOP

6. RESULT ANALYSIS
Both (online and offline) methods were compared

Online conversion:
In the first method, user is supposed to simply copy and paste VRML code in online
convertoravailable athttp://doc.instantreality.org/tools/x3d_encoding_converter/

By applying above discussed method of online conversion tool we got the result:
Dipak Vinayak Shirbhate and Dilip Sahebrao Ingole VSRDIJMCAPE, Vol. VIII (V) May2018 / 144

The final Encoded output will be created just below the convert encoding button.

Copy that final Encoded output and paste it to new text file and save that file with .html extension.

Offline conversion:
In this second method of offline conversion user got the final output as follows:
Dipak Vinayak Shirbhate and Dilip Sahebrao Ingole VSRDIJMCAPE, Vol. VIII (V) May2018 / 145

A new file VW2.html file will be generated in the same bin folder itself.

where input.wrlis vrml file chosen for conversion operating system.

and output.html is the HTML5 file obtained after  Offline converted files can be better manipulated
conversion. Our findings in conversion process are as with mouse as compared to files converted by online
follows: convertor.
 Small files are best suited for online conversion
 Large files are best suited for offline conversion.
7. REFERENCES
 Conversion process works well on windows 7 [1] Fraunhofer IGD/VCST “X3DOM Documentation”
Dipak Vinayak Shirbhate and Dilip Sahebrao Ingole VSRDIJMCAPE, Vol. VIII (V) May2018 / 146

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