VRML in the CAVE 

I've been working on viewing and browsing VRML files in the virtual environment we developed around here called the CAVE. Last spring ('96) I took a course in VR and decided to develop a browser for VRML1.0 (which was all that existed then) as a project. The approach I took was to write it in IRIS Performer. Performer is a high performance graphics library for creating real-time graphics applications. It provides a database library to import database files in many formats, one of them being Open Inventor. Since VRML1.0 is basically a subset of OI, I hacked around with the Inventor loader to make it do additional stuff necessary for a VRML browser. Some of the considerations include caching of worlds and textures, downloading Inlined worlds, enabling multiple viewpoints and such. I worked with the browser a lot more in summer and you can read more about its capabilities here.

Meanwhile, the www-vrml mailing list were debating on the VRML 2.0 specification. They released the spec in August at SIGGRAPH. I thought that it would be cool to develop a browser supporting VRML2.0. This time, however, I decided to start from scratch. I took the VRML1.0 parser QvLib and built upon it. Initially the browser was tightly integrated with Performer, but the lure of making the browser independent of the graphics library was too strong to ignore. The current status of the browser is located here. A unix compilable version of the VRMLScript parser is located here.

Work in progress includes Redundant Links

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Last modified May 7, 1997. Swami