VIPER - A 3D-MODELING AND VISUALIZATION TOOLKIT FOR WEB-BASED APPLICATIONS

The World Wide Web is a medium through which a manufacturer may allow Internet visitors to customize or compose products. Due to missing or rapidly changing standards these applications are often restricted to relatively simple CGI- or Java-based scripts. Usually, results like im ages or movies are stood in a database and are transferred on demand t o the Web-user. Viper (Visualisierung parametrisch editierbarer Raumko mponenten) is a toolkit [3] written in C++ and Java which provides 3D- modeling and visualization methods for developing complex Web-based ap plications. The toolkit has been designed to build a prototypes which can be used to construct and visualize prefabricated homes on the Inte rnet. Alternative applications are outlined in this paper. Within Vipe r, all objects are stored in a scene graph (VSSG), which is the basic data structure of the toolkit. To show the concept and structure of th e toolkit, functionality, and implementation of the prototype are desc ribed. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. Ail rights reserved .