@INTERNET

Virtual Reality: Future of the Web?

VRML, a 3-D programming language, has unleashed some Web creativity

By Thom Stark

I've been a science-fiction fan since I learned to read. On vacation last year, I finally got around to reading Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash. The book is a lot of fun--a campy adventure written with a lot of flash--but it's Stephenson's vision of the shape of virtual space that interested me most. It's set in a time when ubiquitous fiber-optic connections and extremely fast processors have combined with 3-D video-projection technology. This lets the book's hero hang out in the cybermetropolis into which the Internet has evolved: a city complete with buildings, streets, offices, and bistros. All in all, it's not unlike the "Star Trek" holodeck, except that the inhabitants of this computer-generated environment wear virtual bodies, called avatars, that reflect more how the individual user wishes to appear than how he or she actually looks.

A number of folks are putting considerable work into creating useful 3-D technologies on the Internet using the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) that is to their field what HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is to the mainstream World Wide Web. Among these pioneers is Mark Pesce (mpesce@hyperreal.com), the keeper of the VRML Forum at Wired magazine (http://vrml.wired.com/).

Pesce is a visionary and evangelist for VRML, as evidenced by his white paper Scale (its subheads are titled after the major arcana of the tarot), submitted to the VRML Futures planning meeting on Aug. 19. Pesce, Gavin Bell (gavin@sgi.com) at Silicon Graphics Inc., and Anthony S. Parisi (dagobert@netcom.com) wrote the May 25 VRML version 1.0 specification (http://vrml.wired.com/vrml.tech/vrml10-3.html) on which most current VRML sites and browsers are built.

Jan C. Hardenbergh (jch@oki.com) is the keeper of the VRML FAQs (frequently asked questions) at http://www.oki.com/vrml/VRML_FAQ.html, hosted by the Oki Advanced Products Division of Oki Electric Industries Co. Ltd. in Marlborough, Mass. Hardenbergh admits that he can hardly keep up with the flood of new VRML-related information, but the FAQ is well worth browsing for a not overly technical overview.

Virtual Browsers

Once you're past the basics, you might want to download one of the several browsers available for multiple platforms in VRML Repository: Software at http://www.sdsc.edu/SDSC/Partners/vrml/repos_software.html. The only available Apple Computer Inc. Macintosh VRML browser I'm aware of is Gossamer, which you'll have to download and un-BinHex from http://andro.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~aly/software/gossamer/Gossamer2.0.sit.hqx. (Note that this is a BinHex 4.0 archive in Japan.)

For Microsoft Windows 3.1 with the Win32's 1.20 extensions installed, Windows 95, and Windows NT, the venerable WorldView browser available from http://www.webmaster.com:80/vrml/wvwin/ will run as either a standalone application or a Netscape Communications Corp. Netscape Navigator 1.1 helper. WorldView is slated to be available soon for the Macintosh OS.

In addition to the VRML browsers, a handful of VRML authoring tools are available. They include ParaGraph International's HomeSpace Builder 1.0 unsupported beta (ftp://tn.paragraph.com/pub/HomeSpace/hsb10b.exe) for Windows and the Fountain tool from Caligari Corp. (http://www.caligari.com/lvltwo/2homebld.html) due Sept. 30. There also are interactive, Web-based authoring tools, such as the University of Alabama's Layne Thomas (lthomas@cs.uah.edu) and Jon Bennett's (jcrb@fore.com) VRML Maze Generator at http://www.cs.uah.edu/cgi-bin/lthomas/maze.pl. Silicon Graphics offers VRML Authoring Hints and Tips at http://www.sd.tgs.com/~template/WebSpace/Help/vrmlhint.html.

There are a growing number of VRML-based sites on the Web. Point a VRML browser at http://www.hyperion.com/planet9/vrsoma.htm to tour Virtual SOMA, a VRML representation of San Francisco's South of Market area that's home to Wired, vivid studios, and many other leading-edge hypermedia businesses. You can do a "flyover" of the area or "walk" down the street and enter faithful representations of the area's real buildings. Once inside, you can be instantly hyperlinked to the Web sites of that building's businesses. The 3DSite's vrml-links page at http://www.lightside.com/3dsite/cgi/VRML-index.html lists dozens more VRML sites--and its list grows larger almost every day.

Any Web server can make VRML available merely by defining the .wrl file extension as a new Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) type in the appropriate configuration file. For instance, the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) freeware server needs only the following entry in the srm.conf file: AddType x-world/x-vrml wrl.

Mitra (mitra@worlds.net) at Worlds Inc. is the author of the VRML+ extensions to VRML (http://www.worlds.net:80/products/vrmlplus/technical/) that add motion, avatar description, and user text exchange to VRML 1.x specifications.

Worlds (http://www.worlds.net) is hard at work on using VRML+ to turn Neal Stephenson's fiction into functional technology. Its product, Worlds Chat, is basically a glorified chat utility--similar to Internet Relay Chat (IRC)--that pretty much limits you to "conversations" with other users via keyboard. However, in Worlds Chat, you can also see other users' 3-D avatars on your monitor. You can "walk" completely around the avatars in the six texture-mapped chat areas of Worlds Chat's Space Station.

Worlds Chat is little more than a "gee-whiz" toy now, but IBM has taken a serious interest in VRML+. At SIGGRAPH '95 (the Special Interest Group-Graphics exposition) IBM hosted a demonstration virtual tour of its Digital Library using Worlds' technology. The two companies are teaming up on a VRML+ browser tentatively scheduled to be available by year-end.

To experience Worlds Chat for yourself, you'll need Microsoft Windows, Windows 95, or Windows NT running on a 486/ 50 or faster processor, an SVGA card, and at least 8MB of RAM. If your system meets those requirements, download the client software from ftp://ftp.worlds.net/pub/. As of this writing, the current version is in the file wchat06c.exe, but Worlds was about to release version 7, so check for an appropriately named file. It's a self-extracting archive of almost 3MB, thus it will take a while to download via modem.

Snow Crash may just be prophetic--and the technology it predicts may be arriving sooner than most of us imagined.

Thom Stark is President of STARK REALITIES, a LAN/WAN/Internet consulting company based in the San Francisco Bay area. Stark also conducts seminars and tutorials about the Internet for user groups and businesses and at trade shows. His E-mail address is thomst@netcom.com and his URL is http://www.dnai.com/~thomst.