Re: A few notes on text

Gavin Nicol ([email protected])
Tue, 6 Jun 1995 22:41:22 -0400

>> Food for thought: howzabout a node that defines a "window" (a plane
>> that is sited in 3-D space), plus a URL that accompanies it?
>
>Yes, that's exactly what text inside a VRML world should be.

Or more precisely, how large volumes of textual data should be
displayed within VRML. Native text is necessary for text that makes up
part of the framework of a world.

>Implementing that will be... uh.. challenging. If WebSpace
>encounters such a beast that points to http://vrml.wired.com/, what
>should happen? Should netscape (or your favorite HTML browser)
>somehow magically appear in the 3D world, complete with pull-down
>menus and dialog windows projected in 3D in the 3D world?

No, that should happen if you point to the netscape browser. If you
point to http://vrml.wired.com/, you should get the HTML displayed in
a window (just like the HTML widget in Netscape does).

I cannot see what is so challenging about it.

>That would be nice, but being able to take arbitrary X/Motif
>applications and put them into a 3D world (although it has been done
>before-- see http://info.arl.army.mil/~phil/xvr/index.html) is a
>capability you're probably not going to see in VRML browsers for at
>least a few years.

Fresco provides some interesting capabilities here.

I thought that such embedding was quite obviously desirable, and
certainly implementable...