A style-sheet technique for creating 3D Web content

International audienceNowadays, 3DWeb is limited to 3D worlds based on standalone software or Web browser add-ons with few connections with traditional Web contents. New standards, such as HTML 5 associated with WebGL, are emerging, enabling 2D web contents to be merged with 3D contents. A major challenge will be to create 3D environments for multimedia content visualization and browsing that allow 3D worlds to evolve automatically according to external data or other Web contents, all this without using clumsy professional 3D modeling tools. In this article, we present a software environment allowing metaphor-based information presentation, taking into consideration both the data structure (how the user explores and discovers data) as well as the visual aspect (the geometry and data representation) of the computed environment. These metaphors may be used to visualize large volumes of information coming from databases or classic/ semantic search results. The created environments may be highly varying, from 3D interfaces to 3D worlds inside which the user can navigate with an avatar and interact with other users. Various examples are given to illustrate the flexibility of the technique