Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML)

There is also a Hypermail archive of the mailing list.

VRML Parser Library and Draft Spec 1.0

Another VRML-related site you may be interested in is the VRML Repository at the San Diego Supercomputing Center.

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.

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

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

Template Graphics Software

Template Graphics Software, a San Diego-based graphics tools vendor, is integrating VRML functionlity into their commercial SDK and viewer products based upon Open Inventor. TGS is a level-two source licensee from Silicon Graphics Inc. of OpenGL and Open Inventor and is delivering Open Inventor for all non-SGI UNIX workstations, Windows (3.1, NT, 95) and Apple Mac. TGS will support VRML as a subset to the Open Inventor SDK, and will support .iv and .vml viewing in their 3DView product (in development, pre-view copies on request).

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

majordomo@wired.com

No subject, message body:

subscribe www-vrml your-email-address

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).