Week 9 - SIGGRAPH 2007 Day 6

This was my first and hopefully not last visit to the University of California at San Diego's Supercomputing Center. I carpooled to the Center with Don Brutzman and two others. The X3D Earth Working Group got started about 09:20 am once the 14 participants took their seats. Don Brutzman ran the meeting and our UCSD host was the Chief Scientist. We went around the table and room introducing ourselves and stating the reasons we were in attendance. I was not the only one there in learning mode. There were three others who were all ears during the 6-hour gathering. The host spent fair amount of time describing the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) capabilities and projects.
Justin Couch, Yumetech Inc., gave a short presentation on new specification recommendations for X3D earth. His brief left the audience with a few new nodes to study and comment on. Mike McCann, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, demonstrated MBARI's tools that use GeoVRML for visualizing bathymetry data. He told us that MBARI is migrating those tools to use X3D to exploit it features which do not exist in GeoVRML.
Everyone had lunch in the food courtyard amongst the students in summer session.
The afternoon session was filled with discussions about volume rendering and navigation controls across the X3D implementations. There seemed to be an agreement that vendors need to implement navigation controls uniformly for a base set of controls. Don Brutzman gave me a 156 page publication from the first X3D Earth WG that I read on the flight home. I have thought of a few use cases for X3D earth that I will document later in my grant report.
This meeting officially ended my trip at SIGGRAPH 2007.