VRML - Emergence, Popularity, and Rival Technical Upgrade

Emergence, Popularity, and Rival Technical Upgrade

The term VRML was coined by Dave Raggett in a paper called “Extending WWW to support Platform Independent Virtual Reality” submitted to the First World Wide Web Conference in 1994, and first discussed at the WWW94 VRML BOF established by Tim Berners-Lee, where Mark Pesce presented the Labyrinth demo he developed with Tony Parisi and Peter Kennard. In October 1995, at Internet World, Template Graphics Software (TGS) demonstrated a 3D/VRML plug-in for the beta release of Netscape 2.0 by Netscape Communications.

In 1997, a new version of the format was finalized, as VRML97 (also known as VRML2 or VRML 2.0), and became an ISO standard. VRML97 was used on the Internet on some personal homepages and sites such as "CyberTown", which offered 3D chat using Blaxxun Software. The format was championed by SGI's Cosmo Software; when SGI restructured in 1998 the division was sold to Platinum Technologies, which was then taken over by Computer Associates, which did not develop or distribute the software. To fill the void a variety of proprietary Web 3D formats emerged over the next few years, including Microsoft Chrome and Adobe Atmosphere, neither of which is supported today. VRML's capabilities remained largely the same while realtime 3D graphics kept improving. The VRML Consortium changed its name to the Web3D Consortium, and began work on the successor to VRML—X3D.

SGI ran a web site at vrml.sgi.com on which was hosted a string of regular short performances of a character called "Floops" who was a VRML character in a VRML world. Floops was a creation of a company called "Protozoa".

H-Anim is a standard for animated Humanoids, which is based around VRML, and later X3D. The initial version 1.0 of the H-Anim standard was scheduled for submission at the end of March 1998.

VRML provoked much interest but has never seen much serious widespread use. One reason for this may have been the lack of available bandwidth. At the time of VRML's popularity, a majority of users, both business and personal, were using slow dial-up internet access. This had the unfortunate side effect of having users wait for extended periods of time only to find a blocky, ill-lit room with distorted text hanging in seemingly random locations.

VRML experimentation was primarily in education and research where an open specification is most valued. It has now been re-engineered as X3D. The MPEG-4 Interactive Profile (ISO/IEC 14496) was based on VRML (now on X3D), and X3D is largely backward-compatible with it. VRML is also widely used as a file format for interchange of 3D models, particularly from CAD systems.

A free cross-platform runtime implementation of VRML is available in OpenVRML. Its libraries can be used to add both VRML and X3D support to applications, and a GTK+ plugin is available to render VRML/X3D worlds in web browsers.

In a September 17, 1998 Computergram International essay, "VRML Versus Chromeffects: Microsoft Replies", Rachel Chalmers sharply criticized VRML as having "no integration with HTML", whereas "ChromEffects is based on 56 multimedia XML tags". She did not criticize X3D (though extended from VRML as well as XML), because X3D already had this integration. However, VRML survived Chromeffects, canceled in November 1998.

In the 2000s, many companies like Bitmanagement improved the quality level of virtual effects in VRML to the quality level of DirectX 9.0c, but at the expense of using proprietary solutions. All main features like game modeling are already complete. They include multi-pass render with low level setting for Z-buffer, BlendOp, AlphaOp, Stencil, Multi-texture, Shader with HLSL and GLSL support, realtime Render To Texture, Multi Render Target (MRT) and PostProcessing. Many demos shows that VRML already supports lightmap, normalmap, SSAO, CSM and Realtime Environment Reflection along with other virtual effects.