From: Bob Crispen <bob.crispen@boeing.com>
Subject: Re: VRML: Why VRML can't go anywhere
Date: Thu, 9 Oct 1997 21:13:45 GMT
Organization: Boeing Modeling & Simulation Technology


Greg Newby wrote:

> VRML is a totally promising technology - with potential to change how
> we interact with computers completely.  But it's never going to go
> anywhere unless it stops being a victim of (a) standards cowboys and
> (b) browser wars.
> 
> Have you tried getting your VRML world to work across platforms
> lately?  If you want a VRML 2.0 compliant viewer, good luck with
> finding one that will agree with another viewer about what constitutes
> standards-compliant VRML code, if your world has any level of
> complexity.  Or, if your world uses some of the more "obscure"
> language features.  Things like quotes and PROTO fields (sarcasm).

I feel your pain.  I had the job of building a VRML world for
the VRML 98 Symposium website -- it'll probably be tweaked a
whole lot between now and conference time, but it's basically
there now: http://ece.uwaterloo.ca/vrml98/ -- enter, click
on the "To VRML" sign, and click on the duck after it all
loads.

The first thing that was ruled absolutely out of the question
for that world were Script nodes.  Cosmo Player (1.0) doesn't
support Java, Community Place doesn't support JavaScript,
and the SGI versions of Cosmo Player still want VRMLScript
instead of JavaScript.  Sony's Java is different from
WorldView's Java.  Oh yeah.  Cosmo Player 2.0 doesn't
support multiple URLs yet.  Arrrrggggghhhhhh!

Then GIF files.  Not in the standard; therefore a browser
dependency.  Ditto for MIDI files (and I refused to make
people wait for a .wav file to download).  addChildren?
It is to laugh.

Then there was the joy of getting the color and lighting to
look reasonably similar on the most popular plugins (hint:
use *one* DirectionalLight).

And finally, there was the tweaking to overcome one plugin's
Z-buffer tearing and another plugin's hiccup when you view
new parts of the scene (e.g., coming over a hill and looking
down into a valley that was previously hidden).

Yes, boys and girls, this is beta hell.

Fortunately, we have some help on the way.  The conformance
testing is coming on line (bless you NIST folks) and the
two groups involved in color and lighting have been working
like crazy.  And thanks to us content creators, there's
now a huge corpus of legal VRML to test against.

So the issue you care about most (VRML worlds not being
interoperable) is the very issue the folks building the
browsers care about most.

Thank God.  It could have been a lot worse.  VRML plugin
makers really could be warring with one another instead
of cooperating.  But (imho) they realize that user
interface, speed, and hardware support are the real
battleground, not functionality and interoperability.
VRML's a small enough domain that everybody's got to
drink from the same well.

I should have volunteered to be the VRML 99 webmaster.
--
Bob Crispen
Modeling & Simulation Technology
bob.crispen@boeing.com
http://mst.hv.boeing.com/
speaking for me, not for us, and definitely not for y'all