AGOCG VRML / Java3D Information Centre

A reminder that the site: http://www.scs.leeds.ac.uk/vrmljava3d brings you up-to-date information and news on 3D graphics for the Internet. Each week a set of news stories are gathered from newsgroups and mailing lists and presented in a digestible form on the site, providing an easy means of keeping in touch with developments. At time of writing in late June, there are articles on 3D Web graphics to be shown at SIGGRAPH, the new NCSA Portfolio (an object library for Java3D), on-line visualization of stock market data, and a novel idea of combining natural language and VRML in the creation of a talking toy train!

The site is visited around 100 times per week now, and currently contains over 160 articles.

Do you have any suggestions of how we can improve our web service? Please e-mail vrmlj3d@scs.leeds.ac.uk with ideas, suggestions or any comments.

VRML

The VRML community is as busy as ever with the majority of work coming from working groups who are now reaching the later stages of their life cycle. There is interesting standards work emerging:

ECMA script (ie Javascript) and Java language support would become mandatory (this is required for processing of Script nodes)
changes will be made to align with MPEG-4
the External Authoring Interface (EAI) will become an additional part of the standard.

JAVA3D Issues

Java3d is still in its beta phase and Sun is still in a process of ironing out bugs in it and JDK version 1.2. Java3D interest groups are maintaining healthy levels of participation but are yet to witness any serious major applications or developments.

VRML Consortium

The next meeting of the VRML Consortium will be held at Siggraph98, and a report will appear in the next newsletter.

Stuart Lovegrove
Ken Brodlie
School of Computer Studies, University of Leeds
kwb@scs.leeds.ac.uk