Compiling X3D for increased performance and safety

X3D is a powerful and expressive format for defining interactive 3D scenes. Interactive 3D applications, though, require more than just the scene definition; they require extremely complex interactions which are best modeled through scripts and they require a high frame-rate in order to give the user the illusion of fluid interactivity. In this paper we study two techniques that cover these two aspects in detail: rather than the slower, dynamic approach that X3D browsers use, we propose a faster, compiled model. By compiling X3D scenes and their associated scripts our system becomes both faster and safer to use; speed comes from the fact that the compiled scene is very optimized and has no overhead coming from all the dynamic interpretation of the scene and its script, while safety is increased because the compilation pass validates routes, DEFs and even the source of the script to ensure that it only accesses (correctly) valid nodes of the scene. Finally, we show how thanks to the use of XNA as a target library we can run our compiled X3D scenes at high speed in Windows Phone 7 mobile phones and Xbox 360 consoles in addition to Windows PCs.