Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML)

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The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML, often pronounced 'vermal') is the file format standard for 3D multimedia and shared virtual worlds on the Internet. Just as HyperText Markup Language (HTML) led to a population explosion on the Internet by implementing a graphical interface, VRML adds the next level of interaction, structured graphics, and extra dimensions (z and time) to the online experience. The applications of VRML are broad, ranging from prosaic business graphics to entertaining web page graphics, to manufacturing, scientific, entertainment, and educational applications, and of course to 3D shared virtual worlds and communities.

VRML blends the intuitive human sense of space and time with user interface interaction and programming language integration producing a truly new and exciting technology for the Internet. The evolution of the Net from command-line to 2D graphical to emergent 3D interfaces reflects ongoing, fundamental progress toward human-centered interface design--that is, toward a more immersive and responsive computer-mediated experience.

Since its inception in 1994, VRML has been an open standard instilled with the principle that high quality infrastructures can be built out in the open on level playing fields. This results in faster and better products as well as more interesting and productive market competition based on value, not history or platform dependency.

The VRML Consortium was formed to provide a forum for the creation of open standards for VRML specifications, and to accelerate the worldwide demand for products based on these standards through the sponsorship of market and user education programs. VRML applications have been actively pursued by many organizations for quite some time. This community has spearheaded the development of the VRML 1.0 and 2.0 specifications, which provide the basis for the development of associated applications. The organizations involved in this effort felt that the creation of an open consortium focused exclusively on VRML would provide the structure necessary to stabilize, standardize, and nurture VRML for the entire community.


VRML, it's pronounced vur'mel and it's not just another plug-in. To a growing community, VRML represents the seeds of a new Web. A Web more like the real world -- experiential, interactive, continuous, and, of course, three dimensional.

VRML 2.0 is transforming the Web into a medium that is less like reading a magazine and more like real life. HTML took the Internet and made it accessible to millions of people who are comfortable with 2D graphical user interfaces. VRML is going to take the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) to the next level by making it accessible to the billions of people who would rather watch TV than shuffle application windows. Why VRML?


We are hard wired for 3D!

We naturally organize information spatially. Think of receiving a phone call at your desk. During the call you write down the person's phone number on a Post-It note and stick it off to your left. A week later you go to call that person back and you think "where did I put that phone number." In your mind, you picture the Post-It and look over to see that it is exactly where you left it. That is the spatial map that we all have in our heads to keep track of this database called the world. VRML is the key that will unlock the power of this natural ability to organize the current chaos of the Web.


Put some order on the current 2D chaos

The current metaphor for the Web is starting to break. Most people have a bookmark list that runs off the bottom of the page. Even if we were clever enough to categorize the list, now it runs off the side of our screens... Also, take a peek at your monitor, most of us have multiple application windows open and are constantly trying to shuffle around to get to what you want. These problems are inherent to organizing information on a 2D surface. There are only so many pixels to go around. With 3D if you need more space you simply move forward, or you turn your head. In 3D you get infinite screen real estate for a finite number of pixels on the monitor. Cool deal, eh?


Find what you weren't looking for, but wanted anyway

Real estate agents have long babbled "location, location, location." The value of proximity is high in the real world. Locations infer relationships that we use to organize data. Imagine taking a trip to your favorite restaurant. On your way to the restaurant, you pass by a new bookstore. Being a book lover, this is of great value to you and you go inside. You weren't looking for a bookstore, but finding it was a great diversion. If you had teleported directly from your home to the restaurant, you would have never found the bookstore. The value came from your travel and from the location of the bookstore relative to the restaurant.

Researchers and academia have been looking at 3D for years - with the understanding that "it is just better" said Ed McCracken, CEO of Silicon Graphics. There is no reason that the 3D metaphors that we use in real life cannot be translated to the computer to help us get what we want from technology. And there is no reason we should try to constrain ourselves to the accepted 2D interfaces, just because they are already in use.

Mission Statement

The history of the development of the Internet has had three distinct phases; first, the development of the TCP/IP infrastructure which allowed documents and data to be stored in a proximally independent way; that is, Internet provided a layer of abstraction between data sets and the hosts which manipulated them. While this abstraction was useful, it was also confusing; without any clear sense of "what went where", access to Internet was restricted to the class of sysops/net surfers who could maintain internal cognitive maps of the data space.

Next, Tim Berners-Lee's work at CERN, where he developed the hyper-media system known as World Wide Web, added another layer of abstraction to the existing structure. This abstraction provided an "addressing" scheme, a unique identifier (the Universal Resource Locator), which could tell anyone "where to go and how to get there" for any piece of data within the Web. While useful, it lacked dimensionality; there's no there there within the web, and the only type of navigation permissible (other than surfing) is by direct reference. In other words, I can only tell you how to get to the VRML Forum home page by saying, "www.wired.com/", which is not human-centered data. In fact, I need to make an effort to remember it at all. So, while the World Wide Web provides a retrieval mechanism to complement the existing storage mechanism, it leaves a lot to be desired, particularly for human beings.

Finally, we move to "perceptualized" Internetworks, where the data has been sensualized, that is, rendered sensually. If something is represented sensually, it is possible to make sense of it. VRML is an attempt (how successful, only time and effort will tell) to place humans at the center of the Internet, ordering its universe to our whims. In order to do that, the most important single element is a standard that defines the particularities of perception. Virtual Reality Modeling Language is that standard, designed to be a universal description language for multi-participant simulations.

These three phases, storage, retrieval, and perceptualization are analogous to the human process of consciousness, as expressed in terms of semantics and cognitive science. Events occur and are recorded (memory); inferences are drawn from memory (associations), and from sets of related events, maps of the universe are created (cognitive perception). What is important to remember is that the map is not the territory, and we should avoid becoming trapped in any single representation or world-view. Although we need to design to avoid disorientation, we should always push the envelope in the kinds of experience we can bring into manifestation!

This document is the living proof of the success of a process that was committed to being open and flexible, responsive to the needs of a growing Web community. Rather than re-invent the wheel, we have adapted an existing specification (Open Inventor) as the basis from which our own work can grow, saving years of design work and perhaps many mistakes. Now our real work can begin; that of rendering our noospheric space.

History

VRML was conceived in the spring of 1994 at the first annual World Wide Web Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. Tim Berners-Lee and Dave Raggett organized a Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) session to discuss Virtual Reality interfaces to the World Wide Web. Several BOF attendees described projects already underway to build three dimensional graphical visualization tools which inter-operate with the Web. Attendees agreed on the need for these tools to have a common language for specifying 3D world description and WWW hyper-links -- an analog of HTML for virtual reality. The term Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) was coined, and the group resolved to begin specification work after the conference. The word 'Markup' was later changed to 'Modeling' to reflect the graphical nature of VRML.

Shortly after the Geneva BOF session, the www-vrml mailing list was created to discuss the development of a specification for the first version of VRML. The response to the list invitation was overwhelming: within a week, there were over a thousand members. After an initial settling-in period, list moderator Mark Pesce of Labyrinth Group announced his intention to have a draft version of the specification ready by the WWW Fall 1994 conference, a mere five months away. There was general agreement on the list that, while this schedule was aggressive, it was achievable provided that the requirements for the first version were not too ambitious and that VRML could be adapted from an existing solution. The list quickly agreed upon a set of requirements for the first version, and began a search for technologies which could be adapted to fit the needs of VRML.

The search for existing technologies turned up a several worthwhile candidates. After much deliberation the list came to a consensus: the Open Inventor ASCII File Format from Silicon Graphics, Inc. The Inventor File Format supports complete descriptions of 3D worlds with polygonally rendered objects, lighting, materials, ambient properties and realism effects. A subset of the Inventor File Format, with extensions to support networking, forms the basis of VRML. Gavin Bell of Silicon Graphics has adapted the Inventor File Format for VRML, with design input from the mailing list. SGI has publicly stated that the file format is available for use in the open market, and have contributed a file format parser into the public domain to bootstrap VRML viewer development.

This is a clarified version of the 1.0 specification. No features have been added or changed from the original 1.0 version of the spec. This is a 'bug-fix' release of the spec, correcting misspellings, vague wording and misleading examples, and adding wording to better define the semantics of VRML.

See Also