20 February 2013, 12:23

JavaFX 3D Early Access now available

Oracle has announced that the first public build of JavaFX 8 with official support for 3D mesh, 3D camera and 3D lighting is now available. The build is listed as JDK 8 Build b77 and is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris SPARC and x86, but the 3D features are currently only available on Windows; OpenGL versions for the other platforms may follow.

At last year's JavaOne, the developers showed a proof of concept, with help from Canoo and Navis, which showed a practical application of the JavaFX 3D system: monitoring a container terminal with a rendered 3D view of the terminal. The announcement includes some sample code to render a cube, sphere and cylinder. The full plan for Java 8's 3D support is being tracked in an Oracle wiki, 3D Features, which also contains more examples.

A Container Terminal, monitored through JavaFX 3D.