Abstract
The long-term goal of combining virtual reality and the Internet is to create networked multi-user simulations of virtual environments. The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) represents a limited but significant step towards this goal by creating a standard data file format for representing 3D scene information, together with hyperlinks for associating it with other types of Web documents. The recent adoption of the VRML-2.0 standard, which extends VRML-1.0 to add behaviors, will bring this goal closer, but much work remains to be done. This chapter gives a brief summary of VRML and then describes two significant projects currently under development based on i3D, a high-performance VRML browser developed by one of the authors. The first of these, currently being used at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), uses an annotated virtual environment to visualize and walk through the physical design of the new Lepton-Hadron Collider (LHC) before it is built. The second project, “Virtual Sardinia”, allows the user to tour a 3D terrain visualization of the island and access historic and tourist information through hyperlinks.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
F. P. Brooks Jr and P. Frederick: Walkthrough — A Dynamic Graphics System for Simulating Virtual Buildings, Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH Workshop on Interactive 3D Graphics (1986): 9–22.
J.-F. Balaguer and E. Gobbetti: A New Dimension to Hypermedia. http://www.crs4.it/ 3diadm/(1995).
J.-F. Balaguer and E. Gobbetti: i3D: A High-Speed 3D Web Browser. Proc. ACM Symposium on VRML (1995).
T. J. Berners-Lee, R. Cailliau, J.-F. Groff, and B. Pollermann: World Wide Web: The Information Universe. Electronic Networking: Research, Applications, and Policy 2(1) (1992): 52–58.
S. Bryson, R. Pausch, W. Robinett W, and A. van Dam: Implementing Virtual Reality. ACM SIGGRAPH Course Notes 43 (1993).
T. A. Funkhouser and C. H. Séquin, Adaptive Display Algorithms for Interactive Frame Rates During Visualization of Complex Virtual Environments. Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH (1994): 247–254.
S. Ghee and J. Naughton-Green, Programming Virtual Worlds. ACM SIGGRAPH Tutorial Notes on Programming Virtual Worlds (1994): 6.1–6.58.
E. Gobbetti, A. Leone, A. Marini: Virtual Sardinia: a hypermedia fly-through with real data. Proc. International Workshop on Soft Computing in Remote Sensing Data Analysis, Milan (1995).
J. D. Mackinlay, S. Card, and G. Robertson: Rapid Controlled Movement Through a Virtual 3D Workspace. Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH (1990): 171–176.
MicrosoftCorporation: ActiveVRML White Paper. http://www.microsoft.com/intdev/avr/avwhite.htm(1995).
T. Munzner: An Experiment in Three-Dimensional Distributed Hypermedia. The Geometry Center, University of Minnesota (1995).
M. Pesce, P. Kennard, A. Parisi: Cyberspace. Proc. First International World Wide Web Conference (1994).
M. Phillips, S. Levy, and T. Munzner: Geomview User Manual. The Geometry Center, University of Minnesota (1994).
A. Parisi, M. Pesce:Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML). http://www.wired.com/vrml/(1994).
A. Parisi, M. Pesce: Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) Working Specification. http://vrml.wired. com/vrml/(1994).
M. Preston, N. Gatenby, W. T. Hewitt: The Manchester Scene Description Language (MSDL) Version 1.01. http://info.mcc.ac.uk/CGU/MSDL/MSDL-intro.html(1994).
J. Rohlf and J. Helman: Performer: A High Performance Multiprocessing Toolkit for Real-Time 3D Graphics. Proc. SIGGRAPH (1994): 381–395.
Silicon Graphics Inc.: The Moving Worlds Proposal for VRML 2.0. http://vebspace.sgi.com/moving-worlds/(1996).
P. S. Strauss and R. Carey: An Object-Oriented 3D Graphics Toolkit. Proc. SIGGRAPH (1992): 341–347.
I. Sutherland: The Ultimate Display. Proc. IFIP 2 (1965): 506–508.
C.Tollander:CyberspaceDescriptionFormat (CDF). http://vrml.wired.com/proposals/cdf/cdf.html(1994).
C. Upson, T. Fulhauber, D. Kamins, D. Laidlaw, D. Schlegel, J. Vroom, R. Gurwitz, and A. van Dam A: The Application Visualization System: A Computational Environment for Scientific Visualization, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 9(4) (1989): 30–42.
V. Watson: A Breakthrough for Experiencing and Understanding Simulated Physics, ACM SIGGRAPH Course Notes on State of the Art in Data Visualization (1989): IV.26–IV.32.
C. Ware, and B. Osborne, Exploration and Virtual Camera Control in Virtual Three Dimensional Environments, Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH Workshop on Interactive 3D Graphics (1990): 175–183.
Webspace... because the World is not Flat! http://www.webspace.com/
WebOOGL: Integrating 3D graphics and the Web. http://www.geom.umn.edu/software/weboogi/
SDSC WebView-AVRML Internet Browser. http://www.sdsc.edu/EnablingTech/Visualization/vrml/webview.html
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gobbetti, E., Turner, R. (1997). Exploring annotated 3D environments on the World Wide Web. In: Nicholas, C., Mayfield, J. (eds) Intelligent Hypertext. WIH WIH 1994 1993. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1326. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0023958
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0023958
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-63637-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69622-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive