Let me first introduce myself. I am Keith Andrews, project leader
for the Harmony client for Hyper-G here in Graz, Austria. We have been
following VRML developments for some time now and strongly support
your efforts.
As first announced on Developer's Day at WWW'95 in Darmstadt, a
joint effort between IICM, NCSA, and the Gopher team at the University
of Minnesota has been established to develop a VRML browser which will
work with Hyper-G, WWW, and Gopher clients, and which will be made
available in source code form for non-commercial use. We hope to have
a first release out by the end of June 1995.
Please see the attached joint press release and watch this list
(hopefully soon to be newsgroup) for future announcements,
Best regards,
Keith Andrews
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Keith Andrews [email protected]
IICM
Graz University of Technology Tel: +43-316-832551-37
Schieszstattgasse 4a Fax: +43-316-824394
A-8010 Graz
Austria "There are no kangaroos in Austria"
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--- begin Press Release
GRAZ, Austria (26th April 1995) - IICM, home of Hyper-G, NCSA, home of
Mosaic, and the University of Minnesota, home of Gopher, today jointly
announced the development of VRweb, a new three-dimensional Internet
browser based on the emerging VRML standard for 3D objects on the
World-Wide Web.
The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), is a non-proprietary,
platform-independent file format for 3D graphics on the Internet,
based on Silicon Graphics' Open Inventor file format. The three
cooperating institutions endorse the VRML standardisation process and
support efforts to make VRML applications widely available.
The VRweb viewer is based on the Harmony 3D Scene Viewer for Hyper-G
and is designed to work in concert with popular World-Wide Web
browsers, such as Mosaic and Netscape, as well as Hyper-G and Gopher
clients. It allows users to interactively explore 3D models of
objects, virtual worlds, and complex 3D visualisations and follow
hyperlinks embedded in them. In conjunction with the Harmony client
for Hyper-G, VRweb also supports interactive hyperlink creation in 3D
models.
VRweb will be made available in source code form (copyrighted, but
free for non-commercial use), complementing forthcoming commercial
VRML browsers and providing a platform for research and experiment. A
first release of VRweb is scheduled for June 1995 for UNIX platforms
and shortly thereafter for Windows NT.
IICM, NCSA, and the University of Minnesota, all non-profit
organisations with considerable experience of Internet information
systems, make natural partners. The VRweb VRML browser is the first
joint project between the three institutions.
The Institute for Information Processing and Computer Supported New
Media (IICM), part of Graz University of Technology, Austria, is home
to Hyper-G, a multi-protocol (WWW, Gopher, Hyper-G) Internet
information system, which integrates hyperlinking, hierarchical
structuring, sophisticated search, and information management
facilities into a single, tightly-coupled environment. Hyper-G has
supported 3D models and navigational facilities for several years.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), a unit of
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is dedicated to
advancing leading-edge technologies in information and high
performance computing and communications in academia and industry. The
center receives major funding to support its research from the
National Science Foundation, the Advanced Research Projects Agency,
NASA, corporate partners, the State of Illinois, and the University of
Illinois. NCSA is developer of the popular Mosaic Internet browser and
the most widely used WWW server, NCSA httpd.
The University of Minnesota is the home of Internet Gopher, a distributed
document search and retrieval system which combines structured navigation
and full text searches. The Gopher team recently released Unix and Macintosh
GopherVR clients to provide a 3D interface to existing Gopher servers. The
GopherVR interface represents collections of documents as 3D scenes to make
it easy to visualize relationships between the documents. VRML is a natural
extension to GopherVR since VRML scenes can be treated as another type of
document in a Gopher heirarchy.
--- end Press Release