Kaon Interactive is the leading provider of web-based 3D product viewing technologies because Kaon provides the only industrial-strength plug-in-free viewing platform suitable for use on major sites like dell.com, cisco.com, and sonystyle.com. Until recently, this viewing platform was provided primarily as a tool for the display of photo-realistic 3D models created by Kaon. The Meson platform makes the Kaon viewing experience available for a wider variety of 3D models, ranging from highly textured models, to high polygon CAD-generated models. The Meson platform adds a sophisticated 2D compositing engine, as well as a programming language, making it possible to create highly customized user experiences without having to write Java code. Further, Meson is extensible through the Java platform, allowing arbitrary extension of the language and run-time environment for specialized applications. This is all combined in a set of tiny modules, allowing rich visualization without long download waits, and the potential for use on limited-resource platforms, such as mobile devices.

“…Java has been built-in to web browsers from the beginning…”

Kaon uses Sun's Java platform as the runtime environment for its web solutions. Java is the most widely available rich media platform, and has been built-in to web browsers from the beginning. Announcements from Dell, HP, and other vendors ensure that Java will continue to be the most installed client-side web execution platform. Java is also the most widely deployed execution platform on mobile devices and other resource-limited devices, because it has proven security, portability, and high performance.

While Java has continued to evolve to include exciting new features, the Kaon applets use only the strict "1.1.5" subset of the language, which is supported across all operating systems and browsers. Kaon applets run on all Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and Unix variants, ensuring a seamless viewing experience for virtually all users.

“…Meson relies exclusively on software-based 3D rendering…”

Given the constraints of "no plug-in" and cross-platform support, the Meson platform relies exclusively on software-based 3D rendering. This has the advantage that the viewing experience is identical everywhere and can provide viewing capabilities which are not available in the largely game-oriented, platform-specific 3D graphics cards. For example, the Meson viewer can provide real-time edge anti-aliasing, and full screen 256x over-sampled progressive anti-aliasing, for amazingly real-looking 3D views. Only the highest-end 3D graphics processors do any anti-aliasing, and generally only do 4x over-sampling, which leaves visible "jaggies" along object edges at the lower resolutions generally used by web surfers. The removal of the hardware constraint also allows simple extension of the rendering capabilities of the system using ordinary Java code.

“…the interpreter and runtime are only 26K…”

The foundation of the Meson architecture is a "virtual machine" which runs atop the Java runtime environment. This machine interprets an object oriented programming language. The interpreter and runtime environment, including an applet object, are only 26K. Meson programs control the user interface behaviors of the application, and control the loading of other programs and data. The programs are declarative, allowing them to be quite brief. Programs can be directly embedded as text in the HTML page containing the applet, or can be packaged into compressed "jar" files together with media, such as images and 3D models.

The virtual machine can load other modules (called "Gluons") that add more functionality to the underlying system. Two Gluons are available at this time: Raster (less than 40K) provides layered 2D compositing, anti-aliased text rendering, wavelet image decompression, and user interface objects; Scene (less than 50K) provides a 3D rendering engine, 3D mesh decompression, and the scene graph runtime. Applications can add more Gluons to extend the functionality of the system. For example, Gluons could be written to add support for an alternate 3D file format, or to perform inverse kinematics.

In addition to the Gluon interface, Meson programs can access any Java class using the Java Reflection API. Together, the Gluon and Reflection approaches make the platform easily extensible for a wide variety of applications.

Click here for a feature summary, and to see Meson in action…