Interesting WebSpace funcitonality

Brian Behlendorf ([email protected])
Thu, 6 Apr 1995 21:19:13 -0800 (PST)


I'm sure that many of you with SGI's out there have checked out WebSpace
by now, so I thought I'd make a comment about something I saw while
browsing some VRML sites.

VirtualVegas has a couple small ditties up, a simple
couple-dozen-polygon slot machine, and a rotating copy of their
"VirtualVegas" logo.

Yes, that's right, rotating.

I looked at the source, and saw the following:

RotationXYZ {
axis Y
angle 103.891 =
ElapsedTime {
timeIn 797231363.497977 =
GlobalField {
type "SFTime"
realTime 797231363.497977
}
. realTime

speed 0.4
}
. timeOut
}

I tried but I couldn't find any references in the VRML draft spec
(http://www.eit.com/vrml/vrmlspec.html) specifying anything having to do with
"time". Uh, what gives? I realize that WebSpace probably really
implements Inventor as a superset of VRML, but if people start creating
scenes labeled as VRML 1.0 which contain constructs *not* implemented by
other fully valid VRML browsers, we have a problem. This is the
"Netscape Tags" problem all over again.

If those bits of funcitonality are labels as experimental, *no* problem.
If they are a part of all the *toVRML converters we'll see....

Brian

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