One year ago today, at the First International Conference on the World Wide
Web, we presented the first public demonstration of a 3D Web browser.
Two days before that presentation, Dave Raggett and Tim Berners-Lee hosted a
birds-of-a-feather session on "Virtual Reality Markup Languages and the
World Wide Web", giving birth to the acronym VRML.
At that BOF I met Brian Behlendorf of WIRED (now Organic), and Larry Jackson
of NCSA; both of them quite interested in 3D web interfaces, and eager to
support efforts to create a standard markup language for 3D in the Web.
When we returned to San Francisco, Brian and I set up www-vrml, with WIRED's
blessing, bandwidth, and disk space. The rest - well, you can see it all
around you - in BYTE, PC Magazine, and NEWSWEEK.
Yet this is all just so much hype; long before any significant number of
people have used VRML or developed perceptualized interfaces to network
resources, VRML is being hailed as "The Net's Next Big Thing."
Coming from the VR field, I live in fear of hype.
Like AI before it, VR was surrounded by so much unrealizable promise,
inflated expectations, and snake-oil hokum that it could never realize the
potential held out for it.
Instead of neural-jacking into the disembodied cyborg space of Gibson's
Matrix, people donned heavy head-mounted displays and confining clothing to
enter a uncomfortable, slow, and worse-than-cartoon-like shadow of reality.
The VR industry almost died; just as the AI startups passed away after a
brief flowering in the early 1980's, the first fruits of VR also withered on
the vine.
There's a lesson here: don't believe your own press.
***
VRML is a success story; in one year it's gone further than most people had
thought possible. The reasons for this are clear, and speak of another
lesson: on the Internet, collaboration wins.
A resource shared is a resource squared.
Everyone in the VRML community has been sharing what they know; SGI has
contributed an enormous amount of technology that they paid good money to
develop; WIRED has given bandwidth, and thousands of list members have
contributed the best parts of themselves, in thoughtful proposals,
insightful commentary, and helpful tools.
Brian, Gavin, Tony, and Jan have spent many hours working on VRML
specifications, proposals, and evangelism. No one paid them for this; they
did it because they believed in VRML.
Everyone who uses VRML owes each of these gentlemen a debt of gratitude.
***
Anniversaries are a good time to take stock, to look at the road traveled
and assess the road ahead.
Our major accomplishment in the past year is the 1.0 Final specification of
VRML.
It is, in every respect, a success. We have achieved the goals we set out
for it - a viable language which would serve as a 3D interface to the Web.
But it is not without shortcomings; we must be honest enough to face that
fact. VRML is evolution as much as it is revolution; we can learn from
networking and virtual reality research to avoid the most obvious design
pitfalls, but VRML is blazing a path where no one has gone before;
cyberspace is the undiscovered country - we can't expect to know everything
about it before we survey the landscape.
We are all explorers, now; and this is the biggest era of exploration since
the 15th and 16th centuries.
Explorers are often guilty of excesses, of believing their own hype;
Columbus believed he'd discovered India, when he was standing on Cuba.
***
Without being polemical, I would suggest that we still have a long way to
go. Despite its excellence, VRML 1.0 is not ready for prime time.
VRML 1.0 is an experiment in engineering; look at how much we've all learned.
Learning has two parts: the acquisition of knowledge, or enlightenment, and
revelation of one's own ignorance, or endarkenment.
Our enlightenment has been the creation of a powerful technology for
perceptualization of the human knowledge space.
Our endarkenment comes as we start to realize how big the total task is, and
what kinds of technologies need to be driven to bring that task to completion.
VRML 1.0 is well-suited to programmers, designers, and Web pioneers; it
shows us what still needs to be done, and how it might best be done. In
this it is a useful and necessary guide.
People have begun to design applications around what VRML enables; have
begun to think of the Internet as a 3D space, and are starting to imagine
what may soon be possible.
At the same time, VRML 1.0 is effectively grounded without a succinct binary
format, support for URN VRML objects, caching, streaming, and a number of
other features which will make it truly scaleable.
We've hand-waved these into VRML 1.x, which is starting to become an
infinitely-deep toy box of everyone's wishes.
Over the next week I will post a series of documents which outline the
important issues for VRML 1.x, as I see them, and as I have heard expressed
by other members of the VRML community.
I have told the Web community that we will have a draft specification of
VRML 1.x by mid-July. I no longer believe that date is achievable, but do
believe that we can have a draft version by SIGGRAPH '95, in mid-August,
where I will lead a BOF to facilitate resolution of any remaining issues.
Time is of the essence here; by the fall, 3D accelerated graphics (both
hardware and software) will be common; VRML is the first non-games related
application which can take advantage of these new capabilities.
This is our window. If we rise to meet it, we will counter hype with
substance, and deliver a truly scaleable implementation of cyberspace.
We presented that vision to the Web community a year ago, and now they
believe. Let's meet their faith with our works, and deliver something truly
spectacular; created by a community which understands the power of sharing,
pooling, and collaborating.
Mark Pesce
VRML List Moderator
[email protected]