"Yazel, David J." wrote:
> except to say I have never seen a VRML world that was very interesting or
> that I would call a "full application", but for all I know you could
> acoomplish some of the same things going that route.
Many reasons for this - one of which is the simplicity and yet complex
nature of the VRML spec itself. It is extraordinarily difficult to make
an editor tool in VRML. We tried to build a proto (basically a node
template) that would allow just the dragging of an object in any one of
3 dimensions. We sort of got it to work and it took well over 3000 lines
of code (both VRML syntax and javascript) to do it.
At the other end of the scale is the simplicity of the VRML spec. It
doesn't deal with many of the issues you would like it to. For example,
it has no inherent understanding of immersive environments like CAVEs
and relies on the browser to do that work for you. As well, some parts
were not very tightly specified (deliberately) which leads to varying
implementations and therefore behaviour of content.
My first big project with this used a combination of VRML and Java3D.
The prototype, which we had running for well over a year used a full
VRML system that was driven by the EAI. This sorta worked, but for the
interaction we needed (clicking on any object and getting all the items
linked in a database) required us to go to a mixed model that used a lot
of small pre-defined models in VRML and did the main scene control in
Java 3D. The final system ended up tossing VRML altogether in order to
use a custom XML based file format because we needed even more
flexibility than VRML could offer and that the then VRMLloader
implementation could handle (we needed to manipulate the models directly
to add/change text characters inside and we needed to have both 2D and
3D representation in one file).
--
Justin Couch http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/
Freelance Java Consultant http://www.yumetech.com/
Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer http://www.j3d.org/
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"Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now.
Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism
processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with
all your brains, would be useless in a mouse's universe..."
- Greg Bear, Slant
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