Esteemed VRML literates,
Having been gently pushed out of my comfortable corner, I will take Jed's
suggestion and let you all know I exist. I've been lurking for too long, waiting
for inspiration to strike, allowing me to combine my introduction with some
truly juicy topic. In the meantime, I have greatly enjoyed the discussion here.
My past is in MUDs, which played a large role in my life from about 1990 to 1993
and then again in 1998. Text MUDs don't have that much to do with VRML and I
suspect this is one of the reasons it took me a while to post here.
They do of course deal constantly with storytelling. In the simple ones, the
story is simple too, and lacks central control.. In quest-based ones, creators
battle daily with the problems of writing a controlled story-line that every
player can take part in once (but no more), and of explaning how the volcano
that erupted in the last moments of their quest is there again the next
morning Finally, the good ones also have a non-trivial element of
simulation, which changes every aspect of the story-telling.
That's content; on the technical side of things I have no experience with VRML,
but I've done work in relevant areas of Computer Graphics. The thesis for my
M.Sc in Mathematics was on the topic of generating realistic-looking motion for
rigid-body creatures based on high-level description of the goal of the motion.
This is much like the stuff done by The Motion Factory, thou
their code A) works and B) largely ignores the laws of mechanics.
The idea is essentially to write a library of code that can function as an
abstraction layer between actual torques, forces, and muscle spams on the one
hand, and some manner of high-level control on the other (draw a sword, touch my
nose, smile, leap). This is of course essential to being able to tell a VR story
with anything living in it...
Oh, I did tack on an output-generating module to my thesis code to generate
VRML, but I didn't quite have time to finish it... perhaps later (it does
RenderMan at the moment).
To take a step back: I'm in this field for reasons that I suspect I share with a
lot of you; every day brings more fascinating results and products, one step
closer to the aforementioned Glorious Cyberspace Future. I'd like to be in the
middle of things when that happens, and I want to have helped to make it so. For
the moment, world content seems to have won out; as of a few days I've been
given a chance to maybe go for the whole commercial Mud bit. We'll see how that
goes.
Meanwhile, I look forward to more debate.
Par
PS. Swedes may add two dots over the 'a' in my name.
