The future of 3D PDF: Can 3D PDF thrive without JavaScript?

The PDF Association’s 3D PDF and RichMedia Technical Working Groups are looking for people who are interested in helping to reinvent 3D PDF for the future.

What does reinventing 3D PDF entail? It doesn't mean throwing everything away and restarting from scratch; nobody has the time or budget for that! Fortunately, we don’t have to go to such extremes, we just have to figure out how to make better 3D PDFs without JavaScript.

Embedded JavaScript code has been very useful for 3D PDFs for almost 2 decades, allowing 3D PDF producers to work around the fundamental problem of essentially having too much information to show in a relatively small area. To-date, JavaScript is crucial for allowing contextual information to be viewed both with and within the 3D models. So, how do we do that without JavaScript?

Also to the point: Why would we want to do 3D PDFs without JavaScript? One of the main reasons is that there are too few PDF viewers that have implemented the full technology stack for displaying JavaScript-enabled 3D PDFs. Presumably, because it is too difficult and expensive to exactly match the behavior of the one specific viewer that originally implemented that functionality.  Can we grow the ecosystem by making it easier to implement 3D PDF-capable viewers? That’s the idea!

The Rich Media TWG has a set of discrete, relatively small-bore ideas how to tweak 3D PDFs that together could profoundly change how we create and view them:

• Extending PDF's Optional Content system to control highlighting within 3D Models
• Extending PDF Actions so that clicking within a 3D (RichMedia) window can trigger a 3D node-specific Action
• Creating a new type of PDF Annotation that can pull out embedded internal (XMP) metadata and format it for display on a page
• Embedding Step 242-style 3D Validation properties into XMP metadata streams.

Other ideas for improvement are also welcome! The overarching theme to these changes is to move away from 3D PDFs as containers for JavaScript applications and instead embrace and extend existing PDF-centric solutions to the challenges of 3D PDFs.

To make that dream become real, we want to take a Stone Soup approach, where current 3D PDFs being one of the first ingredients being thrown into the metaphorical pot, and skimming out the JavaScript. We are looking for folks from different domains and experiences (newbies and gurus both) to add this or that idea into the mixture.

If this seems like something that you or a colleague might be interested in participating in we will be hosting a free Webinar on February 11^th in which we will delve into this in a bit more detail. I hope that you will join us. Membership in the PDF Association is NOT required to attend the webinar.