I like playing games, of course, they are cutting-edge realtime 3D. I started toying around with the Unreal Editor, which comes for free with Unreal-engine-based games. I started a tutorial and resource website for it, www.unrealroc.com. In 2002, a friend of mine working for ManyOne Networks said they needed someone with real-time 3D experience for their team. So I joined as a technical advisor to the art director, who needed tools for creating compelling 3D for ManyOne's ambitious 'Encyclopedia Galactica' - a realization of Carl Sagan's dream of an online model of all human knowledge. I'd already been making some tools which convert different file formats to and from Unreal, and VRML97 was a pretty good format for conversion, because it deals with more than just geometry and textures. You can also convert sounds, lights, animation, and interactivity. This was of good use to ManyOne Networks. They are all about open-source and open-standards, and asked me to look into such standards for doing the immersive 3D for their universe. At that time, X3D was still in its infancy, but it's compatible with VRML97, so it was an easy format to support in my Unreal file converter. VRML97 and X3D are the only standards I could find that are open, in wide use, and handle a great
amount of game-quality content. My intent is to get this tool usable enough such that the hundreds of fans out there making worlds for Unreal games could easily start making content for ManyOne's network.
The Unreal conversions got the attention of Tony Parisi (one of the fathers of VRML and X3D, and author of Flux, the X3D player), and we began a working relationship. I presented my Unreal-To-X3D conversion program at SIGGRAPH in 2004. I've also cobbled together some other tools to aid X3D artists which you can find on my website.