Re: vrml browsers

Gavin Bell ([email protected])
Thu, 1 Jun 1995 09:04:30 -0700


On Jun 1, 9:48am, [email protected] wrote:
> My impression is that vrml relies heavily on opengl

Nope. They bear some resemblances-- they describe textures and materials in
almost the same way (VRML separates transparency from the material colors--
which causes us headaches in our implementation...) but VRML is meant to be
general enough that it can be implemented on many different rendering
libraries.

OpenGL is very much a "how to draw it" programming interface; VRML is very
much a "what it is" file format. For example, the InterVista VRML browser is
being written using RenderMorphics, I believe.