From: Bullard, Claude L (Len) (clbullar_at_ingr.com)
Date: 16 February 1999
> F'rinstance, I just finally got a friend of mine who runs the Information
> Science hall at a major science museum to look at IrishSpace. Her first
> comment was, "I liked it, but it's not very interactive." (I had warned
> her about that months ago, quoting the "radio play with VRML
> illustrations"
> line, but I guess she forgot.) She wondered what the advantage was of
> doing such a story as VRML rather than as a pre-rendered 3D movie.
>
[Bullard, Claude L (Len)]
Easy. It was what we had. It was free (browser and format). It was open. It had a community to support the building of it. More interactivity was planned: o Too little time. o No joystick support. o Inexperience with the programming model o Platform was unstable (the Java interfaces failed, the browser leaked memory). It had to run in a museum without maintenance. We were surprised we got as far as we did. It owes a lot to the skill and tenacity of Paul Hoffman. VRML 2.0 was still an infant when we started that project. Gavin Bell and Paul Strauss told me in Monterey that it took considerable courage for us to try it. I told them we were probably just too *unknowing* to know. Ignorance is bliss... etc. We wanted to do a prototype of a long form VRML so we could explore the medium and the tools. We learned a lot from that. The main thing was, we met and surpassed most of our goals, and a whole community of wrl'ers grew from doing it. When both community and technology grow, that is a good thing.
> And X3D may mean starting the whole ballgame over again in terms
> of browser distribution.
>
[Bullard, Claude L (Len)]
Which is why we should beat the heck out of every potential vendor, freeware, shareware, costware, whatever, to start building. We have more to learn but more to explore.
> And from what I've seen of it, XML isn't all that much harder
> than HTML -- certainly more complicated, but not so different as to be
> incomprehensible. And we've got Len to help us out when we run into
> trouble. :) )
>
[Bullard, Claude L (Len)]
It's just more tags. Think of it as HTML getting extended endlessly,
so like learning English, every now and then, you have to get out the dictionary or just use the word in a sentence and see who understands what. The bigger issue will be the event model. VRML was designed to make it easy to stitch and twitch, but as we've seen, when it comes time to do more interactive behaviors, the time and the expense go up exponentially. X3D can't solve that anymore than any language can: say interactive, say programming. Canned behaviors help. For storytelling, we need to revive the ideas about a canned set of scripts or interfaces for basic human movements, eg, the behavioral version of H-Anim. len
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