From: broehl@ece.uwaterloo.ca (Bernie Roehl) Subject: Re: INDUSTRY: The VR future (was Immersion studies) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 14:47:20 GMT Message-ID: Organization: University of Waterloo In article <535u1a$koa@news.bellglobal.com>, Marc Bernatchez wrote: >Is it because the industry of VR is slowly dying? I don't get the sense that it's "dying", so much as "evolving". Certainly there's much, much more mainstream interest in real-time 3D now than there ever has been before. Accelerator boards, new input devices, standard file formats, motion capture and performance animation systems, "virtual sets"... a lot of the pieces of what we've called "VR" are falling into place at an astonishing rate. It's true that the "VR" label isn't being used as often, mostly because of all the hype it received in the early days. However, the industry is still alive and well, even if the buzzword isn't. >Maybe we have come to a point where a major innovation >must be put forward in the field in order to keep it on track. Not really a "major innovation" so much as a price/performance breakthrough. There are some very, very good HMDs out there -- if you have tens of thousands of dollars to spend. There are also some very reasonably priced HMDs on the market (under $1000), but sales have been soft -- mostly because of limitations in resolution and field of view. A low-cost, high-quality HMD would revitalize the consumer VR market. >The VR we know of is what could be compared to the good old DOS OS >environment back in the 80's. I'm talking about the way we currently >build our VR systems. They are all very different and there is no >standard interface. [...] We seriously >need to get a common ground platform for VR designer to sit on. We have such a platform right now: VRML. >The VRML isn't taking off partially because of that. It's no more than >an other file format to represent 3D geometries for their displaying >with a browser. It's much, much more than that. You can implement actual behaviors, 3D spatialized audio and real-time interaction all in VRML. In fact, you can do just about anything using VRML and Java that you could do with any of the earlier VR systems. You can also mix and match authoring tools, and the "runtime" systems are free. >There is no viable VRML authoring tool out there. There are several tools out there right now. They're in early beta, but that's not surprising since the VRML 2.0 spec is only nine weeks old. Patience! We've all waited many long years for a standard to appear in the VR industry; we can wait a couple more months until good tools start to appear. -- Bernie Roehl University of Waterloo Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering Mail: broehl@sunee.uwaterloo.ca Voice: (519) 888-4567 x 2607 [work] URL: http://sunee.uwaterloo.ca/~broehl/bernie.html