Index: Requirements
Problems Companies
Platforms Languages
Software Research
- Microsoft's proposal for VRML 2.0. It lost out to Moving
Worlds for two important reasons: Active VRML sucks, and SGI stuffed
the ballot boxes anyway.
- Press release: http://198.105.232.10/corpinfo/press/1995/95dec/vrmlpr.htm
- Microsoft Internet
Explorer already has a VRML plug-in. I don't know if it's actually "Active"
VRML yet.
- Microsoft's definition: http://www.microsoft.com/intdev/avr/avr.htm.
- My opinion: This looks really bad, like they had no idea what they
were doing or what it would be used for, and made up a bizarre new execution
model just to be different. It sports a few gimicks that make their cliche
demos easy to describe (like moving a 3d whooshing sound source around with
a 3d flying logo), that might impress your typical board room of madison
avenue marketing executives, but it's totally useless for implementing anything
the typical DOOM player has come to expect. The "definition" contradicts
itself in places and is incomplete, but tries to introduce some strange
new programming paridigms that "can be implemented efficiently".
Which means that they don't have an efficient implementation, and it would
be hard to do. The important thing about the acceptance of something like
this is that people can understand it, and Microsoft has completely failed
on that regard. Microsoft really didn't have any chance of winning the VRML
2.0 trophey title, but SGI stuffed the ballot boxes just to make sure. Since
Inventor was their file format anyway, before it was renamed VRML for publicity
reasons, it makes sense that they're wresting back control, now that the
"ripened" VRML 2.0 buzzword is a valuable commodity. Now VRML
2.0 is called Moving Worlds, and it's essentially
an 3D API to a programming language that people can understand (Java),
which is a much more tractable problem to solve than trying to come up with
yet another crippled scripting language nailed to the cross of an unsuspecting
3D data file format.
- Here's SGI's comparison of Acive VMRL and Moving
Worlds: http://reality.sgi.com/employees/gavin/vrml/ActiveVRMLResponse.html.