OOGL Paradise?

Mark D. Pesce (mpesce@netcom.com)
Sat, 18 Jun 1994 22:42:12 -0700 (PDT)


VRML Listers

(Speaking for myself here, not as a moderator)

Have any of you yet played with the OOGL viewer, Geomview?

I am using it RIGHT NOW, having gotten it from the folks at the University
of Minnesota.

It's absolutely marvelous, and its a _free_ tool that is evolving, both
of which are important. It handles geomety AND behavior and OOP orientation.

For example: without knowing what I was doing, at all, having just launched
the package, I was able to create a dodecahedral-shaped clock, that is,
an object WITH a behavior, with a few simple mousepresses.

Very impressive.

All we need to do to integrate it into WWW is masssage the code to
work within a MIME-compatible Web viewer, such as Mosaic, which launches
Geomview with the appropriate geometry, and provide the Labyrinth-like
capability of messaging back to Mosaic (something _easy_ to do in the UNIX
version and very hard indeed in the Mac and Win versions), and bam, you
there.

I'd also link in a faster renderer (LG has a license for the RenderMorphics,
Ltd. RealityLab renderer) to see what happened. The performance is pretty
slow on my SS1.

However, it is a starting poing, and OOGL deserves carful consideration as
a VRML starting point.

Whadda ya think?

The OOGL viewer is avalable for SGI, NeXT, and SunOS4.x workstations.
Please try it if you get a chance, so we call decide what we think about
an existing tool that does about 99.44% of the job we need done.

Mark Pesce

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