History%20of%20VRML%20and%20Its%20Development%20Process

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History of VRML and Its Development Process
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Learning Objectives

• Understand the history of VRML
• Understand the purpose and functions of VRML
• Learn how to view a VRML file in a file and have
  a general conception of how the file is defined
• Understand where VRML may go in the future.

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History
Here is a nice historical summary of the process.
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The Origin

• Created by the International Organization for
  Standardization (ISO) and the International
  Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).
• Passed by 75 vote of member organizations

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Purpose

• 3D interactive objects and worlds
• Web based
• Universal interchange format for 3D graphics and
  multimedia

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Design Criteria

• Authorability
• Composability
• Extensibility
• Performance
• Scalability

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What it Does

• Implicitly establishes a world coordinate space
  for all objects defined in the file, as well as
  all objects included by the file
• Explicitly defines and composes a set of 3D and
  multimedia objects
• Can specify hyperlinks to other files and
  applications
• Can define object behaviors.

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General Operational Model
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Features 1
Taken from http//www.virtualrealms.com.au/vrml/tu
te01/tutorial.htm

• Navigation - many control options - walk, fly,
  examine or none (Contact and Cortona also support
  proprietary 3rd-person avatar modes)
• Viewpoints - pre-defined camera positions
• Models - primitives (box, sphere, cone,
  cylinder), extrusions, indexed face set (mesh),
  line set, point set, elevation grid and text
  (Contact and Cortona also support proprietary
  spline and NURBS geometry)
• Materials - diffuse color, specular, emissive,
  ambient, shininess, transparency, color per
  vertex
• Sound - fully spacialized 3D audio in WAVE or
  MIDI format
• Textures - support for JPEG, GIF, PNG and MPEG1
  video. (Contact and Cortona also have proprietary
  support for Flash, RealMedia, AVI,
  multi-texturing and environment mapping)

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Features 2

• Collisions - collision detection between user and
  objects (As of version 4, Cortona supports object
  to object collision detection)
• Animation - animate position, rotation, scale,
  points, color and much more. Scope for many
  separate animations in one world all with
  different time lines and triggered by different
  events. Almost every attribute can be animated!
• Sensors - sense user activity such as touch, drag
  (plane, cylinder and sphere), time, proximity,
  visibility (Contact and Cortona also have
  proprietary support for key sensors and drag 'n'
  drop sensors)
• Scripting - Interfaces directly with Javascript,
  Java, the web browser and any programming
  language residing on the client/server

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Features 3

• Routes - scripts, animations and object
  properties can be "wired" together in an infinite
  number of ways to create any effect
• Compact - extremely small file size with gzip
  compression
• Modular - references external textures, models,
  scenes and scripts
• Extensible - if the core VRML nodes aren't enough
  you can create your own nodes using Prototypes
• Other - Cortona and Contact support full-screen
  mode and 3D stereo with the right hardware. They
  can also both be embedded in either a web page or
  a stand-alone application with full control of
  the scene graph and 3D engine from C, java,
  javascript and vbscript.

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Objects

• Box
• Cone
• Cylinder
• ElevationGrid
• Extrusion
• IndexedFaceSet
• IndexedLineSet
• PointSet
• Sphere
• Text

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Future 1

• As stated in the History section a
  revision/replacement for VRML97 has been proposed
  called X3D (Extensible 3D). In short it adds the
  following new functionality and formalizes some
  extensions that have developed since VRML97.
• Full backwards compatibility with VRML97
• Full extensibility through Components and
  Profiles
• Core profile is a limited subset of VRML97 for
  lightweight plug-ins and MPEG4 compatibility
• Optional XML and binary encodings, in addition to
  VRML's traditional ASCII encoding
• H-Anim - Humanoid Animation. Standardized
  hierarchical structure and interface for animated
  avatars
• GeoVRML the representation of accurate real-time
  geographical data using VRML
• NURBS - organic models described using NURBS
  mathematics rather than polygons thus
  significantly reducing file size and increasing
  render optimization

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Future 2

• 2-way Web page communication through a
  multi-language scene authoring interface (SAI)
• Universal Media - In-built standard media items
  (textures, models etc) to speed download time
• Multi-texturing extensions
• Enhanced sensors (keyboard, joystick, drag 'n'
  drop etc)
• Additionally VRML is included or referenced in
  the upcoming MPEG-4 standard, Java3D and in other
  developing standards.
• Some of the new proprietary Web3D technologies
  are derivatives of VRML
• Blaxxun3D (www.blaxxun.com)
• Shout3D (www.shout3d.com)
• Sony Blendo (www.blendomedia.com)

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Example
Transform
Third child - a blue box
translation -2.4 .2 1 rotation 0 1 1
.9 children Shape
geometry Box appearance Appearance
material Material diffuseColor 0
0 1 Blue
end of children for world

• VRML V2.0 utf8
• Transform
• children
• NavigationInfo headlight FALSE We'll
  add our own light
• DirectionalLight First child
• direction 0 0 -1 Light
  illuminating the scene
• Transform Second child - a
  red sphere
• translation 3 0 1
• children
• Shape
• geometry Sphere radius 2.3
• appearance Appearance
• material Material diffuseColor 1 0
  0 Red

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Some Points of Grammar

• Files begin with
• VRML V2.0 utf8 optional comment ltline
  terminatorgt
• begin comments
• control characters, space double or single
  quotes, sharp, comma, period, brackets, backslash
  or braces are not allowed in names
• First character can not be a digit, plus or minus