Innovative 3D Visualizations and the Collaborative Art of Reddit’s Place Experiment

We create a simple x3dom-based timelapse 3D visualization of Reddit’s Place experiment. Like many other successful companies, the solution uses X3DOM for efficient 3D visualization – right inside your browser! CAEplex is providing a web-based interface for finite-element analysis on the cloud. Furthermore, 3D-ICONS is another noteable example of a cultural heritage project that uses X3DOM technology. The software tool can visualize large models three-dimensionally in all web browsers on computer or mobile devices and no additional plug-ins are required.

Technical Showcases and Open Source Projects

Due to recent work by contributors from Toshiba Corporation, X3DOM now has a mode that supports joined visualization of volumetric and polygonal data. With the RadarVolumeStyle node, this exciting combination is already possible, correctly combining depth values from polygonal rendering with the current depth during volume raycasting. In addition to this, there is now a new project hosted on GitHub: A simple CAD viewer, based on X3DOM. This application could serve as a basis for your own CAD projects.

The X3DOM team is also happy to announce the launch of an open-source component editor project, which is now being hosted on GitHub. Current Features include:

• Alignment tool for primitives, using reference points / reference vectors
• Snapping data to grid during editing
• Support for different units (meters, centimeters, inches, …)
• Exchangeable UI styles
• Import / Export using JSON

Collaborative 3D Engineering and Education

Researchers at the Advanced Community Information Systems (ACIS) Group at RWTH Aachen University use X3DOM to realize a collaborative 3D viewer for teaching anatomy. Aim of the project is the creation, deployment and utilization of a pool of digital 3D anatomic models for accessing them anywhere and anytime over the Web using a standard Web browser. To realize their CREALIS® 3D product configuration tool, ORISA Software GmbH uses X3DOM. Product Configurator CREALIS® is the well-proven configuration system for manufacturers of variants in mechanical engineering, plant construction, and automobile industry.

Reddit r/place: A Massive Online Collaboration

In a small corner of the internet, starting on 1 April 2022 and planned to last just 5 days, something marvellous has been completed over the past few days, a giant collaborative art project that took off and became, if nothing else, an illustration of people working together, competing against each other, negotiating and creating a mad mosaic of pixelated art. Worldwide over 6 million people participated in 2022. By the end of the project, nearly 72 million tiles had been placed, each one representing a pixel on the canvas, at a rate of more than 2.5 million tiles per hour.

Dynamics of the Canvas

The creeping black blob this time around was a group called The Void, that also added creepy faces when they had conquered a space. Rather than merely a destructive force, the void is another type of collaborative operation. Another group kept the blue corner alive on the bottom right, harking back to the 2017 original. There was also a green lattice, a green line that snaked across the canvas and was incorporated into other sections.

The Dutch Contribution: r/placeNL

Around 10,000 people in the Netherlands took part. That’s 0.5% of the total Dutch population! The headline grabber for the Dutch this year was a reproduction of Rembrandt’s De Nachtwacht (The Night Watch), an image built up of 15,000 pixels. To produce a complicated image like the Night Watch, a single script was used to instruct bots to add their next pixel at exact five-minute intervals, following the uploaded template.

Project Data and Statistics

The following table summarizes key data points from the X3DOM ecosystem and the Reddit r/place experiment: