Blaxxun VRML Browser Source Released

Cave Newt writes "The Web3D Consortium just released the source code to Blaxxun's CC3D VRML browser, which Blaxxun kindly donated in order to seed the development of a fully conformant, completely open and preferably multi-platform VRML browser. Pretty darned cool. "

Comments

Open? Hardly...

[reverse solidus]

It's yet another "Community Source" license. Lots of interesting little twists, though, including a ban on using the source code outside the USA, Eurpoean Union, Australia, and Japan. The rest of the world is SOL. There's an especially amusing addendum to the license that makes the Web3d consortium thought police for Blaxxun. Check out:
EUA, Web3d/Blaxxun Agreement, Amusing addendum

Not open source, not good for the VRML community

[kbonin]

The Web3D Consortium is "cooperating" with yet another for-profit entity, in this case Blaxxun. The source is not open, in fact the "community license" and addendum terms are one of the most restrictive yet released.

Blaxxun probably released it in an attempt to subvert mindshare away from the OpenVRML group and others now starting up that want to make a truly open source VRML browser.

As for "the Web3D Consortium", they will cut a deal with anyone who will pay their bills or keep them in the drivers seat in behalf of their corporate sponsors: Microsoft, Blaxxun, SGI, Sony, Apple, ect.

They had lofty goals. Politics and money have made it impossible for any of them to be acheived. This deal is no exception.

Good, but...

[rmull]

I have yet to see a single good use for VRML. This may be due to the fact that there aren't any good browsers for linux, but i've seldom run across anything other than a novelty site that even has VRML on it. Though I'm sure I'll be proved wrong...

Yes, it was overhyped, but don't trash it already

[Hanno]

I'm surprised by so many "hey, wasn't VRML that thing that didn't work out?" comments here.

Yes, VRML was overhyped to the maximum, so much that most everyone started hating it; but if you consider it, VRML _is_ a good idea done _right_.

Just think of today's market in consumer computer graphics. Current low-cost graphics cards for standard PCs have the 3D processing power that was exclusively available to high end graphics workstations only a very short time ago. The vast majority of today's computers are equipped with 3D graphics cards. And the only product research made by graphics card manufacturers is in the 3D sector.

And of course the games market, that is driving this technology. There is practically _no_ 2D game available today. When I first saw Doom-like first person shooters, I never expected to see games like we have today - I too thought that 3D was "just a trend".

I'm pretty sure that there will be a need for 3D in internet applications and I am glad that VRML is here already as a working solution. It's not as important as its inventors claimed it would be, but it's certainly more than "just a trend" and surely more than a failure.

there're reasons VRML isn't taking off

[incubus]

I spent quite a bit of time looking at VRML.
In a word, it sucks and here's why.
The concept behind VRML is exactly that of HTML. It's a markup language. While this is sufficient for stuff you read and browse through, it's not sufficient for an interactive environment.
VRML comes in world files which generally have a .wrl extension. Typically this 'world' is loaded into your VRML browser, and then rendered as appropriate.
If you hit a particular link, it loads up another .wrl file from the server and sends ya over there.

While this method is fine for web pages.. it's *not* fine for an interactive 3D environment. That's the problem... you need something more interactive than a highly-static format.

There are *some* facilities for doing things dynamically with VRML, but from what I saw, they were mainly hacks with javascript etc that look like they weren't really planned during the original design.

The sum of this analysis is that taking what works for web browsing and just 'doing it in 3D' is not the right philosophy.

Here's a fair example, you can't do anything dynamic that would require changes to the wrl file loaded in the browser. To do that.. you have to reload the wrl file... which is unreasonable.
Almost any sort of behavior the objects you create are going to have... has to be predefined in the .wrl file. (I said almost).

VRML is unpopular for a reason.

This is almost entirely incorrect.

[zipwow]

Lets look at what you said:

The concept behind VRML is exactly that of HTML. It's a markup language

It's not a markup language. The 'M' in VRML is 'Modeling'. Virtual Reality Modeling Laguage. What would it mark-up? It began as a standard way to describe objects in 3D and proceeded from there. Proceeded a lot, actually.

There are *some* facilities for doing things dynamically with VRML, but from what I saw, they were mainly hacks with javascript etc that look like they weren't really planned during the original design

This isn't the case either. VRML's design has the basic things that you need to get things done in 3d: interpolators, sensors for spherical, planar, and cylindrical mouse movement, collision sensors, proximity sensors, time sensors and more, nicely set up in an event-driven model. Many interactions don't even require any code. Map a plane sensor to a position interpolator and you can move things around by clicking and dragging.

Now while its true that VRML does not have its own programming language, it does provide a specific interface to code 'bits', the SCRIPT node. This is as designed, mostly because VRML existed before Java was really strong. Some people use javascript (yuck, but simple) some folks use Java, some use C++, but if your browser supported it (a big if) you could use perl or smalltalk or anything. Kind of nice, in my opinion.

Here's a fair example, you can't do anything dynamic that would require changes to the wrl file loaded in the browser

This just isn't true. Your code nodes (in whatever language) can add and remove things from the scene at will, resize them, move their individual points to morph them, etc.

I believe you must've looked at the early VRML, VRML 1.0. This is equivalent to looking at the first release of Java and saying, "oh, its all bollocks" and never looking again.

So why isn't VRML the next big thing? Well, there's several theories, Blaxxun's attacking the most widely held: no good browsers. Java's the de facto standard for scripting info in a VRML browser, and there are all kinds of interesting things you could do, but almost no browser completely supports the VRML97 specification AND the Java specification. There are VRML browsers written using Java3D, but they are largely incomplete, and a bit slow.

Some folks have also said that VRML is something of a solution in search of a problem. What would you do with VRML on the web? Yeah, there's lots of cool stuff, but very few of them pay well, and others (like online gaming) require fast, efficient browsers, and really don't benefit from the openness of the standard.

Zipwow