These are some links on techical topics related to VRML that interest me. These are by no means the only or even the most important topics affecting VRML, but I'd like to learn more about them. Hopefully other folks will put together some similar pages, and when we link them together like a webring, we'll have a good technical foundation people can study.
Objects that come out of modelers or converters are too big. That makes VRML files slow to download and render. By reducing the points in the objects (called surface simplification or mesh decimation) you can make worlds much smaller. Another technique that has a high potential to help is progressive meshes, where you load a low-resolution model which is rendered right away, and as the object continues to load, progressively higher and higher levels of detail are shown.
Thanks to some of Don Brutzman's colleagues, I had access to some real map data and satellite images and bathymetry data for Monterey Bay when I worked on the website for the VRML 98 Symposium. And as I debugged the duck's flight path and added objects, I spent a number of hours in that virtual world. So when I arrived at my hotel room for the conference, I looked out the window at the bay and it hit me: I've been here. An immersive 3D map gives a feeling of familiarity that you simply can't get from a paper map. But getting from the geo data to the immersive world presently takes quite a bit of work that has to be done by hand. I'd like the experience I had not to be unique, but to be the common property of humankind.
"Daddy/Mommy, tell me a story." Every child has made this plaintive request, and every grown-up child still wants to hear a story. Multi-user worlds suffer too often from the banality of the chat that goes on. Maybe what we need is not so much the ability to communicate as the ability to communicate within the context of a narrative. Perhaps the real key to a successful VRML world lies not in its design or technical gimmicks, but in its ability to tell a story as it can only be told in interactive, animated 3D. How do you do that? So far nobody knows, but there are some very talented people working on the problem and some fascinating research that's starting to point to places where the answer might be hiding.
Did I miss a good technical link on these subjects? Let me know.
-- Bob Crispen