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Text File
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1994-10-01
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207 lines
VIRTUAL REALITY MODELING LANGUAGE (VRML)
Due to the intense interest expressed within the WorldWideWeb
community during WWW '94 in Geneva, for a visualized interface to the
Internet and the Web, we have entered into an open forum discussion
for the design and implementation of a platform-independent language
for virtual reality scene design. We have visions as to what we want
to be able to do with VRML - we also have goals for this mailing list
and conference.
You can see what's new in this directory (as well as what's been
changed or updated recently). There is also a Hypermail archive of the
mailing list.
_________________________________________________________________
VRML Survey Results
A survey was conducted in August to assess what features we wanted in
the baseline spec, and which of the 8 proposals mentioned so far
merited closer inspection. The results of that survey are available.
Please read this document to see where we stand in the review and
development process.
The survey results indicated that three proposals merited further
review - SGI's Open Inventor, University of Minnesota's OOGL, and
Autodesk's Cyberspace Description Format.
Proposed VRML Systems
Here are the remaining possible proposals for VRML:
SGI Open Inventor
A standard with a lot of history and support. Gavin Bell and
Rikk Carey have made a statement regarding its use by the open
market to address the concerns people have. They have also
submitted a full proposal for implementing it as a baseline
VRML specification.
Here's a concise argument by John Barrus as to why it's a good
place to start.
Besoft is working on a general purpose behavior representation
format for Inventor.
OOGL, an "Object-Oriented Graphics Language"
OOGL was developed several years ago at the Geometry Center in
Minnesota, and since that time it has seen extensive testing
as a geometric visualization format in mathematics, physical
sciences, and engineering. It is a non-proprietary,
time-tested language with support for sophisticated graphics
and support for hyperbolic geometry. You can also check out A
WWW interface called WebOOGL.
Cyberspace Description Format (CDF)
Proposed by Autodesk
And other proposals which were mentioned:
A File Format for the Interchange of Virtual Worlds
By Bernie Roehl and Kerry Bonin
As the Virtual Reality industry matures, there is an increasing
need for standardization. In particular, there is a need for a
standard file format for storing descriptions of both
individual objects and entire worlds. This document proposes
such a file format. It addresses such issues as the
description of object geometry, object hierarchy, material
properties, and various other elements that are typically used
to describe a virtual environment.
Labyrinth-VRML Specification version 1.3.1.
The VRML specification as implemented by the current
(pre-alpha) version of Labyrinth.
Manchester Scene Description Language
Allows the specification of 3-D objects, and a C/C++ parser
library is already available.
Added Sunday, June 19th
Meme
Immersive System's Multitasking Extensible Messaging
Environment
Proposed by Marc de Groot, immersive@kg6kf.ampr.org
Added Wednesday, June 22nd
TSIPP
A Tcl extension
Proposed by John Ellson (ellson@hotsand.att.com)
Added Wednesday, June 22nd
_________________________________________________________________
VRML Concepts
Please read our visions and the goals we have for this mailing list
and conference.
"Extending WWW to support Platform Independent Virtual Reality" by
Dave Raggett.
This is a proposal to allow VR environments to be incorporated
into the World Wide Web, thereby allowing users to "walk"
around and push through doors to follow hyperlinks to other
parts of the Web. VRML is proposed as a logical markup format
for non-proprietary platform independent VR. The format
describes VR environments as compositions of logical elements.
Additional details are specified using a universal resource
naming scheme supporting retrieval of shared resources over
the network. The paper closes with ideas for how to extend
this to support virtual presence teleconferencing.
" Cyberspace" by Mark Pesce.
This work describes a visualization tool for WWW, "Labyrinth",
which uses WWW and a newly defined protocol, Cyberspace
Protocol (CP) to visualize and maintain a uniform definition
of objects, scene arragement, and spatio-location which is
consistent across all of Internet. Several technologies have
been invented to handle the scaling problems associated with
widely-shared spaces, including a distributed server
methodology for resolving spatial requests. A new languague,
Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) is introduced as a
beginning proposal for WWW visualization.
_________________________________________________________________
Other VR Research
Here are other VR-related projects we should look at.
Open Virtual Reality Testbed
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Open Geodata Interoperability Specification
Creating a behavioral model for the distributed processing of
spatial data.
Virtual-Worlds FTP Archive and HITLab FTP site.
At University of Washington.
The NPSNET Research Group
The Naval Postgraduate School Networked Vehicle Simulator IV,
and other work on networked VR.
Renderware, from Criterion Software Ltd.
Renderware is an API for 3D application building on DOS,
MS-Windows and Sparc architectures. It'll possibly be useful
for building a viewer for these platforms.
_________________________________________________________________
VRML Mailing List
To join the VRML standards discussion, please subscribe to the
www-vrml mailing list. Send mail to:
majordomo@wired.com
No subject, message body:
subscribe www-vrml your-email-address
Before posting, please read the ettiquette guide.
A text-only (for now, hypermail archive coming soon) archive of the
VRML mailing list is also available.
Biographies of some of the participants in the WWW-VRML list are
available, on the principle that it's harder to flame someone when you
know something about them.
Finally, Jason Cunliffe (jasonc@panix.com) has summarized VRML's
existance to date pretty well.
For more information contact Mark Pesce (mpesce@hyperreal.com) or
Brian Behlendorf (brian@wired.com).
_________________________________________________________________
mpesce@hyperreal.com & brian@wired.com
Last Modified: 09:24:48 PM - September 23, 1994 PST