Today, The Khronos® Group announces the release of the 3D Commerce Viewer Certification Program. 3D viewers are software engines that enable users to display and interact with 3D models. Viewers are used by retailers, social media sites, and brands to create experiences on ecommerce storefronts, search engines, ad platforms, and in native applications. The Viewer Certification Program enables 3D viewers across the industry to demonstrate that they can accurately and consistently display 3D products, clearing the way for reliable 3D and AR-powered shopping across multiple platforms and devices. Amazon, Babylon.js, CGTrader, Emersya, Epic Games (Unreal Engine), Facebook (Spark AR), Google ( & Scene Viewer), Samsung (Internet Browser on Android), SketchFab, Unity, and UX3D (Gestaltor) have begun the process of certifying their viewers under this new program.
As the number of 3D assets used in e-commerce rapidly increases, the need to embed semantic information describing virtual products within real-time 3D formats such as glTF™ becomes ever more urgent. 3D asset files that contain descriptive and administrative metadata such as product descriptions, details on intellectual property rights, creation and modification dates and other detailed authoring history - all in multiple languages - will enable the management of 3D virtual product catalogs, and the sharing of assets between vendors, retailers and end user platforms at industrial scale.
Join the Khronos Group’s 3D Commerce Working Group members making a difference in the world of 3D graphics from popular retail and tech companies like Amazon, IKEA, Microsoft, Shopify, Wayfair, and more as they take a deep dive into the ways people experience 3D graphics on the web and in stores. This virtual event highlights the recently announced Viewer Certification Program that was created to lower the barriers to 3D asset creation and implementation. This event shares the vision for a future empowered by 3D across education, medical, design, advertising, art, and more. You’ll learn what Pervasive 3D is, why it’s worth working towards, and what’s next.
The recording of Pi Apparel’s panel discussion, “Interoperability & Standardization: What is Needed to Realise Seamless 3D Avatar Transfer, Export & Upload?” is now available!
The RealTime Conference returns April 26-28 with the theme “Merging Physical and Digital Worlds - The Rise of the Metaverse.” With this theme in mind, the opening keynote speaker will be Khronos President, Neil Trevett and he will present, “Building the Metaverse One Standard at a Time.” More than 6,500 attendees are expected to attend.
In the coming years, the booming online retail industry is set to be revolutionised by high-performance technology that’s more commonly associated with video games than digital shopping: implementing high render 3D graphics is one of the driving forces.
The groundwork for a revolution is already underway. Retailers have joined forces in an extraordinary collaboration that will lead to the creation of standards and agreed formats — a vital part of the 3D retail revolution. The work underway right now is similar to the process that led to the creation of the JPEG, a standardized picture format that’s now become ubiquitous in the past two decades. A total of 70 companies including Wayfair and IKEA are now involved in a project called the 3D Commerce Working Group, set up by The Khronos Group.
RapidCompact recently interviewed Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos Group and Vice President of Developer Ecosystems at NVIDIA. In the interview, Neil shares his thoughts on the present and future of 3D, discussing the work Khronos is carrying out for the industry, and how 3D content is soon to become pervasive.
Recently, the Khronos 3D Commerce Working Group hosted a webinar to discuss its activities, including why industry alignment on the glTF file format (the “JPEG for 3D”) is crucial, and how standardization will bring new opportunities to any designer, retailer, manufacturer or technology company developing 3D experiences. The panel was led and moderated by Leonard Daly, President of Daly Realism, who was joined by industry experts from Wayfair, UX3D, Amazon Imaging Services, Autodesk, DGG, DreamView, Microsoft and Shopify. At the end of the webinar, the audience submitted questions for the panelists. The answers as a Q&A are now available online.
Max Limper, CEO of RapidCompact, explains how the Khronos Group’s 3D Commerce Working Group is aiming to set standards for content creators to create web optimised 3D models.
RapidCompact has a three part blog looking at the benefits of e-commerce and the importance of an efficient delivery format. In this part, RapidCompact looks at streamlined 3D workflows and addresses the challenges represented by variety of interfaces, manual workload, and lack of consistency. RapidCompact, an active member in Khronos’ 3D Commerce WG, addresses these needs through active collaboration in the industry to align the ecosystem, enable sustainable innovation, and ease consistency through standardization.
The newly formed 3D Commerce Working Group is tasked with exploring the opportunity to accelerate the adoption of 3D experiences by establishing a set of universal standards for platform-agnostic 3D model creation and distribution.
Shrenik Sadalgi, Director of the Next R&D Group at Wayfair and Chair of the 3D Commerce Working Group, believes the industry needs standards and guidelines so that 3D content can be experienced consistently across a variety of platforms and on a variety of devices. Other challenges that standardization can help address include optimizing industry workflows to minimize cost, and bringing down barriers to entry for retailers and technologists. “Bringing this kind of radical change across the retail industry will require collaboration between many different retail and technology companies.”
In the world of e-commerce, many products come in different options, or variants. When shopping online, for example, colors and materials of a brand of shoe might have an image representing each option. And now, in addition to using 2D images, more and more retailers are starting to use 3D and AR to merchandise products in online channels to enable customers to more fully experience products or view items in their environment in rich 3D. Each time a customer views a different colored shoe, there’s a good chance that another complete 3D model is being loaded just to display that color variant. This leads to increased download times and wasted bandwidth as the files contain a lot of redundant data, including downloading exactly the same geometry multiple times. In turn this causes increased memory usage on the device, and slower interactivity, resulting in a poor customer experience. Learn how the Khronos Group and the 3D Commerce working group is improving this.
DGG CEO Dr. Max Limper is co-chair of the Asset Creation TSG. DGG is happy to have had the opportunity to contribute to this effort and believes that these kinds of joined-up activities and achievements will support rapid growth in the industry. DGG has aligned the development of their RapidCompact platform with the Asset Creation Guidelines, so that RapidCompact users can optimize the 3D assets to match with the official publishing targets fully-automatically, without requiring 3D domain expertise. Learn more about DGG, RapidCompant, and how they are working with the Khronos Group 3D Commerce working group.
