My name is Dave Durbin and I'm a freelance computer consultant based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Ever since reading Bill Gibson's "Neuromancer" back in 1986 I have been smitten with the idea of bring some kind of visualisation/sensualisation to the Internet, although at that time I had little idea of how to go about it and the net was not readily perceivable in terms of real time 3D graphics (or in fact any graphics at all!!!).
This dream has bugged me for 9 years now. In that time I have been on a knowledge bender! I knew that I needed to try to acquire the programming, design and technical skills which would let me build my dream and share it with the world. I read up on the Internet and TCP/IP, Virtual Reality and 3D graphics, I built my own dataglove and some software to go with it, I sat for hours in darkened rooms wearing red/blue lenses - in short I was a man possessed!
Well, this week, whilst looking aound for information on OpenGL for OS/2 I stumbled on the VRML forum on Wired. Imagine my joy!!! Here was a like minded group of people who were actually making it happen!
So here I am! I want to play a part in the development of VRML and the tools necessary to make it a global standard. I have C and C++ programming skills on the PC platform under DOS, Windows 3.x and OS/2 presentation manager. I have a good understanding of 3D graphics fundamentals and a little knowledge of tcp/ip programming and the various higher level protocols employed on the Internet.
I am keen and fired up to do pretty much anything here so let me know what help if any I can provide!
As a pet project of my own, I'd like to start building an OS/2 VRML browser and hopefully (ultimately) link it into IBM's Web Explorer. I haven't seen any mention of an OS/2 browser (eg no OS/2 port of Webspace) and would be interested if anyone else has started down this path. For my part, I have DL'd the QvLib (NT) source code and am working on a port to OS/2, I have some Windows 3.x rendering routines which I could also port to presentation manager and have enrolled on the OS/2 OpenGL beta program hopefully this will provide me with tools to build a more portable rendeing engine.
Anyway, enough from me for the time being. Please let me know if there is anything practical I can do to assist.
Thanks,
Dave Durbin
Visual Systems Solutions Ltd.