VRML Behaviors Workshop

Mitra 31 Oct 95
This document is part of a collection of VRML2.0 history at http://www.mitra.biz/vrml/vrml2/mw_history.html

Please let me know any mistakes, especially if I've misrepresented someone's position on any of the issues.


The behaviors workshop at SDSC in San Diego drew around 40 participants interested in adding behaviors to VRML. A significant fraction were also interested in adding multi-user capabilities to VRML although there was no time to address this as well.

Most of the first day was taken up with presentations of behavior within existing VRML systems. This showed both the potential for this, and the need for standardisation work to ensure that worlds would work across different browsers.

The debate basically came down to the difference between Gavin's dataflow model and SDSC, SONY and my event handler model. After some additions to the dataflow model it was clear that either model could do any task, it was mostly a question of how easily. After much debate there was an informal poll of developers, with SDSC, SONY, DIVE, Chaco, Superscape, Lockheed, Worlds and EnterTV favoring the Event driven model, and BSI and DimensionX undecided.

The event then split into three sub-groups, with about 20 people going over the nitty gritty details of the event model. We were basically working from the behaviors and api proposals at http://www.mitra.biz/vrml/vrml2/vrml-behaviors.html and http://www.mitra.biz/vrml/vrml2/vrml-api.html, and looking for the open issues, areas for further work etc. The following points were discussed, and some conclusions drawn.