WEB

Anthropohedron ([email protected])
Wed, 14 Jun 1995 07:48:20 -0400


First off, let me introduce myself. I am Greg Seidman, and I am working in
the Virtual Reality group in the Information Systems Engineering division
at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (formerly the
National Bureau of Standards) for the summer. I will be entering my third
year of undergrad study in Computer Science at the University of Maryland
at College Park in the Fall.

That said, I have been having a problem with VRML, specifically with
WWWAnchors. I have not had the opportunity to test this on any viewer
except Webspace (for SGI... I have found that the Solaris version causes
kernel panics to often to make it useful). I have a power saw modelled in
VRML (http://speckle.ncsl.nist.gov/~gseidman/cybersaw/saw.wrl) and,
unsurprisingly, it is made up of several chunks (handle, motor, bladeguard,
etc.). I have been asked to make a sequence of "building" this saw from its
parts, i.e. first the motor is shown, then the motor with the enclosure,
then add the bladeguard, and finally add the handle. This is to be done
with links, so one can click on each model and get the next one.

I have created these models, the first of which is
<http://speckle.ncsl.nist.gov/~gseidman/cybersaw/build1.wrl>, with a
WWWAnchor node in each one pointing to the next model. Each of the four
builds can be loaded into Webspace, either loading as a local file or an
http href, but actually clicking on one model to go to the next causes
Webspace to just sit, claiming it is reading an inline. I haven't let it
sit more than 20 minutes, but it never seems to come up.

I would appreciate if someone, or several someones, would be willing to
take a look at it and tell me either what I've done wrong or what bug I
have encountered in Webspace. It is, of course, possible that I have done
something to make Webspace behave improperly on my side, so any reports of
"it worked just fine for me" are appreciated as well. Presumably responses
are of unique interest to me and should not be forwarded to the whole list.
My Reply-To is set properly (I think). If something turns out to be of
interest to the list as a whole I will post a summary.

Thanks,
--Greg