Re: Inventor in baby c-space (roger@apollo.is.co.za)

Virtual Reality (vrprj@department-computer-studies.napier.ac.uk)
Thu, 14 Jul 94 11:26:00 BST


Hi,

Not sure how to make a posting to the VRML discussion but here goes...

It sounds like one of the ideas of VRML is to incorporate it into some
kind of Web thang. I see it as being a more general form of language which
could be applied to all things VR. I think the client side of things
should be doing all of the processing to interpret the VRML and actually
render the images and respond to user inputs. The server would have to
provide the VRML along with object and world data to the client. This
initial transfer of geometry info could be quite time consuming however.

To have any kind of interaction with the Virtual World, other than flying around
it, we need to attach some sort of behavioural characteristics to objects.
This is a current research interest of mine. What we need is a language
that can describe what objects do when certain events happen to them, such
as, begin selected, moving towards them, walking into them, animations,
objects colliding with each other, etc...

A small interpreted language would be ideal, though I'm not sure about
the suitability of either LISP or Forth. Something a bit simpler than any
one can use. May be even with a graphical editor, some sort of visual language,
with icons and such like... Are there any syntaxes around that could serve
as a starting point?

The use of PLG files would be a useful way of describing objects. However,
I'd tend to favour 3D Studio .ASC files at the moment as then can be
easily edited. The VR/REND386 .WLD files are quite good, but I'm not keen
on the state-machine approach to animation and object interaction.

Cheers,

Peter Johnson

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Virtual World Design Project
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Email: vrprj@uk.ac.napier.dcs

"If you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of graphic design
tools, they will produce something infinitely ugly" (Ben Elton 1993)

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