Flux single-user client

Draft

Definition

See [[X3D], the successor. VRML is still in use, but I suggest that people new to Web3D should rather go for X3D.

Copy/Paste from here: http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/vrml/vrmlman/node5.html

The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) can been seen as a 3-D visual extension of the WWW. People can navigate through 3-D space and click on objects representing URLs (including other VRML worlds). Often, VRML is pronounced like ``Vermal, not ``V-R-M-L.

As Mark Pesce [Pesce, 1995, p. 16] points out, the WWW had two fundamental dimensions: connectivity (the http protocol) and interface (i.e. the rendering of content, especially HTML and embedded URLS). VRML inserts itself seamlessly in the Web's connectivity. VRML browsers can access other VRML files via an URL. They can access any other format that then is passed to another application (e.g. an HTML browser or a HTML window). On the other hand HTML browsers can be configured to fire up VRML helper applications (or plug-ins). HTTP servers, finally, can be configured to tell the client that a VRML (*.wrl) document is transferred.

A short word on its history: The major impulse for VRML can be traced back to a ``birds of the feature sessions on ``Virtual Reality Markup Languages at the First International Conference on the World-Wide-Web, May 25-27, 1994 at CERN in Geneva. It's conceptual origins are older, e.g. (a) Science Fiction literature (e.g. [Gibson, 1994], [Stephenson, 1992]), (b) Mark Pesce's, P. Kennard's and Toni Parisi's ``Labyrinth system ([Pesce et al., 1994]) and proposal for a 3-D navigation and representation scheme and (c) more generally 3-D computer graphics (including VR). Based upon SGI's ``Open Inventor format, a almost final draft for VRML 1.0 was presented at the second WWW conference in fall 94 in Chicago. On April 3, 1995 SGI presented WebSpace, the first publicly available VRML browser. So all in all it took about a year to set standards and make the first browser available. Since VRML is a relatively simple format building upon a well defined standard, very quickly a number of modeling tools and convertors also became available.

References

• Ames, A. L., Nadeau, D. R., et Moreland, J. L. (1996b). The VRML Sourcebook. Wiley, New York.

• Pesce, M. (1995). VRML, Browsing and Building Cyberspace. New Riders, Indianapolis.

• Pesce, M. D., Kennard, P., et S., P. A. (1994). Cyberspace. In Proceedings of The First International Conference on The World-Wide Web.

• Stephenson, N. (1992). Snow Crash. Bantam.