PHIL and Intro

John W. Barrus (barrus@merl.com)
Fri, 10 Jun 1994 08:01:59 -0400

My name is John Barrus and I am at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs. We
are interested in network based collaboration and learning. I am a
mechanical engineer who created a Virtual Workshop for creating parts (a
building-metaphor CAD system) for my PhD thesis and do a lot of programming
for graphics, geometric modeling and VR. I also build novel input devices.

Some thoughts on the WWW-VRML. Forgive me if some of these things have
been covered already.

For people with text-only readers, perhaps one way to make the VRML stuff
backward compatible would be to include a text description of each item in
the scene. For instance a cube sitting on the ground might include the
comment (or SoLabel, for Open Inventor) "There is a box sitting on the
ground." or "There is a small red box sitting next to the wall on the
ground", similar to the way MUD's describe items. A non-VR user could then
read the text and click on the text to find out what is in the box. It
might provide a speedy link through some rich environments on other
continents besides not handicapping the blind or the VRMosaic-impaired.
Although a text viewer would limit interactions in some ways, it merits
some consideration.

John Barrus

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John Barrus barrus@merl.com

Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories 617.621.7535 (VOICE)
201 Broadway 617.621.7550 (FAX)
Cambridge, MA 02139