[thelist] Whatever happened to VRML?

[viveka]

4:23 PM -0600 10/3/01, Naju V wrote:
>Or let me make the question more general, what's the current state of 3D
>Animation in webpages?

Lively ;) More detail below...

[summary - VRML is alive, it won the standards war.
It's in MPEG4. It's being extended, there's an XML
encoding now, as well as stuff like NURBS.
New players offer superior software toys.
New low-end computers play VRML with full-screen,
full-motion clarity; consumer 3D is here.
Proprietary spin-the-object plugins swarm in their
hundreds, and occupy various niches.]

>On the VRML situation, all I can remember is reading that the company
>working on the Cosmo set of tools for VRML authoring was acquired by Silicon
>Graphics and later sold to some other company.

Cosmo Software was originally a division of Silicon Graphics.
They spun it off to focus on their "core competencies".
There's a bizarre story here which i won't go into too much
(sgi went through a weird period, almost became a branded
NT clone maker, and recovered at the last moment, ditching
the CEO who did this to them (and HP before them - he now
works for M$) - pulling out of the Redmond-inspired nosedive
to recover their lost ground in the high-end graphics workstation
market and embrace Linux).

In the meantime though, Cosmo Software was bought by
Platinum, who were the fourth or fifth largest software
company on earth at the time. They wanted to go in to
VRML hardcore as a visualisation adjunct to their financial
services stuff. They announced that the entire Cosmo suite -
the CosmoPlayer plugin, as well as the insanely great
authoring package Cosmo Worlds and a bunch of other
stuff, would be released as Open Source.

No sooner were the words out of their mouth than Platinum
was bought out by the world's third-largest software
company, Computer Associates (CAI), in a hostile takeover.

CAI had no interest in VRML, and have effectively killed
Cosmo Player. It's still available for download from
http://www.cosmosoftware.com but it's not being
updated or supported. Cosmo Worlds etc. are no longer
available at all. The NT version anyway - if you have
an IRIX machine you can download the IRIX version
of Cosmo Worlds for free from the sgi website.
Of course, the source code was never released
either. CAI have a share of MetaStream - more on
that later.

So Cosmo is dead. VRML, on the other hand, is alive
and kicking. There are two main players, both European:

Parallel Graphics have the leading VRML plugin, Cortona.
It's available for Mac, Windows and Windows CE.
They've announced plans for a Linux version too.
It's better than Cosmo Player was in a lot of ways.
It supports a bunch of the new VRML extensions - for
example NURBS and GeoVRML. It's also stable,
supported, and actively updated. It also runs on
Windows as a standalone ActiveX thingy. They
give it away, and sell a bunch of authoring tools.
http://www.parallelgraphics.com/

Blaxxun has the other main VRML plugin, Contact.
It's Windows only, and specialised for multi-user
worlds. It does NURBS as well. They're doing a lot
of business. http://www.blaxxun.com/
http://www.cybertown.com/

Both Parallel Graphics and Blaxxun have Java
VRML-lite engines as well, to get around the
plugin-install hump. There's another one such,
called Shout3D - http://www.shout3d.com/
The Cortona plugin download is less than 1MB
(CosmoPlayer was over 3MB as i recall).

There's also an Open Source VRML browser
called Lookat, available for most platforms.
http://www.openvrml.org

>Does modern browsers include
>the plug-ins for VRML viewing?

No :\ No VRML plugin comes bundled with any
modern web browser. Most people don't have
them installed. If you want a seamless experience,
say for a spinning-3D-object in anonline store,
your best bet is Java. If you want to make a real
immersive 3D world, you've got to convince people
to install the plugin.

>It's been years since I've come across a
>website using VRML.

There are a lot out there, although it's a drop in
the ocean compared to 2D web pages. I believe it
always will be - it's just harder to build a virtual
world than to mark up a page of text, and there
are less sensible reasons to do it. If you want to
see a huge list of great VRML worlds, check out:
http://www.web3d.about.com/compute/web3d/cs/web3dapplications/index.htm
Go get Cortona first, of course.
If you want to see something amazing, try
this one first: http://vrml.environs.com/ivan/
The lunar lander is astonishing.

>What happened to this technology that was, imho, not
>actually awesome but somewhat interesting and promising? I mean, some people
>have way more bandwidth and processing power available than they did in
>1996. For instance, the renderings, which didn't look very nice and fast on
>my 486 might just work in my Celeron at 600 mhz and downloading vrml files
>with a cable modem is a totally different thing than doing it at 28.8.

Yep - this is exactly what's happening, right now. In fact,
the bandwidth requirements are not all that huge - for
example, from the site above:

>>The scene shows the famous WW 1 three-wing fighter airplane Fokker 
>>Dr.1 and the detailed and functioning cutaway model of its engine. 
>>The airplane is presented here in two different color schemes - the 
>>green one flown by Ltn. Paul Baumer (43 kills) from Jagdstaffel 2, 
>>and the blue one flown by Ltn. August Raben, leader of Jagdstaffel 
>>18.
>>
>>The compressed VRML file size is below 12 kB.

If you don't know what you're doing though, and use
a first-generation exporter on a high-polygon model
in a CAD program, it's possible to create huge VRML
files. This isn't happening so much anymore, thankfully.

The CPU/graphics card requirements are pretty high though,
especially for complex worlds. Much too high for 1997, which
was the year of premature VRML hype. However - any recent
machine (Ivan recommends a Pentium 166MMX with 24 MB of
RAM and moderately good graphic card running at 16 bit color)
will display most worlds beautifully. I work with very complex
models - entire cities. These render jerkily on my original-model
iBook (laptops are notorious for bad 3D). The recent-model
iBooks, however, will render even my city-sized worlds at 30FPS,
fullscreen, no problem.

>What were the problems with vrml besides the processing and bandwidth issues?

Ubiquity. Chicken and egg. Like a million other plugins,
you need to get it in the browsers before people can see
the content, but you need compelling content or the
browser makers won't put it in.

The install base of VRML is about to climb though -
VRML is the 3D layer of MPEG4. So it'll be in your
set-top box.

Sony are working on the next-generation
of rich-media VRML; their implementation is called
Blendo, and it runs on the Playstation 2.

>What other options are there available for 3D authoring on webpages?

There are a bunch. You can do VRML and deliver
for Cortona, or embed it as a Java applet if it's a
small, non-complex world without too much
interaction. Go to Parallel Graphics for some
good tools. Almost all 3D programs export
VRML geometry, and some of them will export
VRML animation as well. If you want a visual
tool for interactivity and animation like Cosmo
Worlds used to be, try Spazz3D for Windows -
http://www.spazz3d.com
It supports NURBS, h-anim for humanoid
animation, and will export to Shout3D for
Java delivery if you like. There's a free trial
and it's cheap to buy.

If you're a Java programmer, you can do
Java3D, though Java-enhanced VRML seems
to be more popular these days...

If you just want spinning objects without
interactivity, then check out Metastream -
it's not nearly as full-featured as VRML, but
it does single spinning objects _really well_.
Great for e-commerce visualisation.
MetaStream is all that's left of MetaCreations -
they sold off Poser, Painter, the KPT suite,
Carrara, Canoma etc in order to just do
Web3D. They've recently merged with
Viewpoint Digital and their product name
is now Explore(?). Note that it only works
on Windows, and it looks like you need 3D
Studio Max to author for it, and it looks
like you need to buy their server license.
http://www.viewpoint.com

The other option for this kind of thing is to
do a QuicktimeVR object movie. It's not
really 3D, just a series of photographs
that give the illusion of a spinning object.
But from the end-user's point of view, the
only difference is that they probably have
Quicktime, so it'll work. You can also do
QuicktimeVR panoramas, which are the
immersive-world thing, but also based on
photographs (a single panoramic pic in
this case), so the viewer is in a fixed point
rather than being able to enter and
interact with the scene.
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtvr/

>I've heard that there are some programs in which you can do some modeling and
>export the result to flash but how does this work? How affordable 
>are these tools?

Yep, these are pretty cool. If you want the
look of 3D, but don't need the user to move
around the 3D world, they work well. They
really just render out a 3D animation to
a 2D vector animation. So it's more of a 3D-look
effect for Flash, rather than VR. 2 and a half D.

You can generally import a DXF or EPS file and do
basic stuff with it like trace, extrude, add bevels,
and rotate it. If you want more complex animation,
Vecta3D can export one from 3D Studio Max if you
have it. There are a couple of these; capabilities
vary, so check them out if you're interested:
http://www.swift3d.com/ - $139.00
http://www.vecta3d.com/ - similar price, more
for the 3D studio Max plugin version.

>Does 3D in a webpage make any sense to you at all?

I'm not sure. 3D on the _net_, absolutely. Quake is
a good example of this. I reckon a more extensive,
flexible protocol like VRML, implemented as a standalone
browser (which is what LookAt is, incidentally), instead
of imprisoned in a Web Browser plugin, could be amazing.

Spinning objects bore me. I think 2D (e.g. standard
web pages) belong inside a 3D world. That makes more
sense to me than embedding 3D objects and environments
in a 2D page metaphor. The Sony Blendo work has some
good demos of how to do this well.

On the other hand, the next version of VRML has an XML
encoding (called X3D) - which makes it easier to integrate
as a datatype on the Web.

It's a lot of fun to do, anyway, and I think it's reached the
threshhold of viability now. Time for the VRML comeback ;)

For more info, try http://web3d.about.com
If you're using a Mac, i help to run MacWeb3D.org - the
address is in my .sig, but we're having server problems,
so try the mirror at http://www.karmanaut.com/macweb3d

Regards,

V.
-- 
|  Viveka Weiley, Karmanaut.	 http://www.karmanaut.com
|  hypermedia :: virtual worlds :: human interface :: truth :: beauty
|  http://www.planet-earth.org :: http://www.MacWeb3D.org
|  http://www.sydney.siggraph.org.au