A Little Fashionable 3D

Image courtesy Excite Inc.

ShoutInteractive is shaking up the 3D world again with a breakthrough demonstration of 3D for the fashion world. Macy's Passport 99 is a live charitable event coupled with a technological tour-de-force web site. The highlight of the online event is ShoutInteractive's 3D Fashion show hosted at Excitextreme.

The 3D fashion show let's you select male or female models and dress them with clothes from particular designers. The amazing thing about the whole thing is that the highly interactive 3D example uses NO PLUG-IN. I can't state that enough....no plug-in needed! Using a technology they call Shout3D this pure Java based demo is in reality an early implementation of Shout's proposal for X3D to the Web3D Consortium.

This particular Shout3D demo includes: real-time skeletal deformation (the model mesh is being deformed by an animated set of bones); anti-aliasing; multiple animated colored lights ; 360-degree panoramic backgrounds; extensive interactivity -- e.g. the ability to change skin/hair color, pose the model, change walks, and control camera movement (clicking and dragging on the scene changes the viewpoint). And ya just can't beat that "undress the model" option.

I can't wait to see fashion shows like this with the type of models the Illusion2K project from the Elite Modeling Agency is developing. In fact a contest is now underway for all you computer graphic artists who dream of building the perfect virtual supermodel.

One of the impediments to ubiquitous 3D on the Web is the dreaded plug-in download and install issue. Shout3D clearly demonstrates that useful 3D is possible without the plug-in.

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