The vast majority of datasets in Astrophysics contain a large number of dimensions: either by combining multiple datasets in a combined analysis, or intrinsically – for example the 3D data cubes from radio telescopes and integral field spectrographs.

Analyzing and working with these multi-dimensional datasets is difficult. Sharing and publishing them even more so. Nowadays, although nearly all scientific journals are published online, astronomers still almost exclusively rely on 2D diagrams to share the content of one’s datasets. This implies that complex datasets are systematically cropped, sliced and /or projected to reduce their dimensionality. At times, this is a beneficial process that can help emphasize certain elements within the dataset. Often, this is however very detrimental to the clarity of the scientific message.

With the X3D pathway, we introduced a new approach to share and publish 3D models interactively in scientific journals. The X3D pathway revolves around the X3D format, a open-source (and ISO standard) file format that can encode 3D shapes and structures. In particular, X3D models can be visualised interactively using most mainstream web browsers out-of-the-box, i.e. without the need of any specific plugin or specific tools. This offers great freedom for the readers — able to use which ever browser they enjoy most — and only requires some simple HTML (and possibly javascript) scripting to setup.