Publication Date: January 31, 1997

Related article: A Few VRML Tips for Businesses

VRML: Creating New Realities

By Sue Mellen

It's a compelling image: Howard Rheingold, sporting his trademark Indiana Jones-style hat, popping in and out of frames in those Kinko's commercials promoting virtual offices. One minute he is sitting in front of his PC extolling the virtues of technology, and the next he's standing beside a salesperson, who greets him with a simple, "Hi, Howard."

Most TV viewers don't know or care who "Howard" is. For them, the special effects sell the spot, and they get the idea that the company promises to help them create their own virtual realities. But for Web insiders, Rheingold's presence is a potent symbol of the rise of VRML, or Virtual Reality Modeling Language, and the possibilities it presents.

VRML is the scene description language for representing three-dimensionality on the World Wide Web and for virtual reality products. The name, coined at the first World Wide Web Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, in spring 1994, reflects VRML's family ties to HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). Whereas HTML is used to display text, VRML is used to display graphics. A VRML-enabled browser or plug-in interprets the geometric description of objects to render the illusion of a 3-D scene. The language is platform independent and accessible over low bandwidth connections.

Rheingold, who writes and lectures about virtual communities; Mark Pesce, one of VRML's creators; and a growing cadre of VRML evangelists believe the language is the key to more than just a 3-D Web environment. They see it as the foundation of a worldwide community in which VRML's graphical nature supports and enhances text-based communication, especially synchronous, or real-time, interaction.

Certainly, the growth of virtual communities far predates the development of VRML and the Web. At last count, there were more than 600,000 regular users of Internet Relay Chat, a network of discussion groups using real-time communication. And fantasy game aficionados developed MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons, or Multi-User Domains) about two decades ago. MUDs are a text-based means of conducting complicated, interactive role-playing games with people all over the world.

One way to experience the melding of fantasy-based communication with a graphical environment is to visit The Palace, sponsored by The Palace, Inc. of Beaverton, Ore. The site is a doorway to more than 1,000 palaces, or virtual environments, offering synchronous communication to more than 300,000 users. Originally part of Time Warner Interactive, The Palace now produces CD-ROMs, including software that facilitates communications at various Palace sites.

Rheingold has been involved in virtual communities since 1985, when he found his way to the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), an online gathering place divided into members-only "conferences" or discussion areas. He, for one, sees this kind of interaction as being central to civilization's growth. Writing in The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace, Rheingold says, "It is our task -- our essential, central, crucial task -- to transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures. It is the only way that human evolution will be able to proceed."

Saving the Web with 3-D

The jury is still out on whether virtual reality and VRML will boost human civilization to a new evolutionary plane. But many industry analysts believe that the standardization and widening availability of 3-D building blocks in VRML could go a long way toward helping the World Wide Web move out from under its cloud of unmet expectations. In order to make it as a mass-market medium, the Web must provide a more natural, fluid experience, they say. Serious users have grown comfortable with the flat, 2-D representations, but it will take the illusion of 3-D to make other people trade their TV remotes for keyboards, they say.

"VRML is currently being considered as a means of navigating the Web. Actually, it's a much more natural way of getting around cyberspace. When you're navigating in 3-D, you feel as if you're walking through a city or town rather than just clicking from one picture to the next. So you can look around and see all kinds of things you wouldn't otherwise have noticed," says Nathan Wagoner of Duck Soup Information Services, based in Alexandria, Pa.

Konstantin Guericke, vice president of strategic partnerships for Black Sun Interactive, says VRML makes good use of a Web traveler's inherent sense of space. "Using VRML, you can leverage the fact that each of your visitors has spent his entire life navigating in three dimensions. We make sense of the world by quickly analyzing factors such as the speed of approaching objects (e.g. a car), the location of light sources and the texture of surfaces. Just like in the real world, the visitor maintains a first-person perspective and completely controls how close to move towards an object and from what perspective to view it," Guericke writes in a white paper titled What is VRML. Prior to joining Black Sun, Guericke was executive vice president of Caligari Corp., producer of a number of VRML tools.

The close relationship between HTML and VRML usually makes it fairly easy to transform a Web site into the 3-D world. Some of the more popular authoring tools are Virtus Walkthrough, Silicon Graphic's WebSpace Author, ParaGraph's Home Space Builder and Caligari's Pioneer, with Pioneer doubling as a VRML browser. Other browsers include Intervista WorldView, and Paper Software's WebFX.

How do you know whether or not to transform your site into a 3-D virtual world? "There's sort of a 'gee whiz' factor here. If you bill yourself as a company on the cutting-edge of technology, you should probably incorporate 3-D. Visitors will begin to expect it," Wagoner advises.

Bringing VRML Into the Real World

In the real world, VRML will eventually prove invaluable in communicating complex ideas that would otherwise require a great deal of text, Wagoner says. "If you are trying to show a lot of statistical data in a spreadsheet format, for example, you might be better able to communicate it with a 3-D model," he explains.

Currently, the World Health Organization is using VRML to create a 3-D model of the Earth showing where epidemics start and, in real-time, how they move around the planet. That would be virtually impossible in 2-D. Other potential uses include mapping cosmological and meteorological data.

In the day-to-day business realm, VRML is making its way into more corporate meetings. Its ability to support synchronous communications structures means that people in far-flung corners of the world can attend corporate meetings, assess data and discuss issues in real-time. Microsoft has a product called NetMeeting to facilitate such corporate get-togethers.

Still, Wagoner warns, the future of virtual communications is not to wrap it around a product because the medium's social aspects do not necessarily transfer well into the realm of marketing. That, however, does not make virtual communities any less important as a business tool. Rather, community building can be a form of customer building.

"Most of what goes on in business is social, after all, and this is the ultimate social medium," Wagoner says.

Sue Mellen writes from Tyngsboro, Mass.

---

Related article: A Few VRML Tips for Businesses

Additional VRML resources:

• Howard Rheingold's "Brainstorms" page.
• Silicon Graphic's VRML overview.
• Mark Pesce's History of VRML.

Nathan Wagoner is a featured speaker at DCI's Internet Expo. Please see the latest online brochure for program and registration details.

---

Please rate this article

---