Now that i think about it, this could probably be useful for displaying chemical molecules. From what i understand jmol has been on the wishlist for quite a while. I don't know how much would be involved in this, but we could conceivably make a js molecule viewer (on the theory js is better than java). At the very least it could display simple molecules. -- - bawolff Caution: The mass of this product contains the energy equivalent of 85 million tons of TNT per net ounce of weight. On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 2:31 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

2009/9/24 David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>om>: Chemical models are something with a proven history in this area (usually implemented through java applets if online). Other options would be being able to examine things like moons from all angles (where enough images exist) at admittedly low resolution. At least would be an improvement on this like this: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iorotateing1day.ogg I'm sure millhist could find a use for it as well as wider use by people dealing with historical objects that no longer exist (I certainly like to create a model of a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caisson_lock ) There isn't a that much free software that can do modeling 3-D chemical structures (Biclipse may be able to do it haven't tried) otherwise it might be possible to outright buy the rights to some of the older bits of software (anyone know what happened to Nemesis?). For more complex stuff we would likely have to rely on models by third parties. The potential problem is that we do not want to become a "only really works in firefox" site. There was enough trouble caused by people building sites that only really worked in IE. We do not want to create the situation anew with firefox. -- geni

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 1:39 AM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Note that there's a "competing" Google standard called O3D doing more or less the same thing, although in a different way: http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/ Afaik Google has said to be commited to supporing both standards. Mozilla is doing the same, although O3D is currently only available as a plugin for Firefox and not as a built-in library like WebGL. More background info: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/08/webgl-standard-to-bring-3d-… -- Hay