Virtual reality and the Internet Note: (STF) - Want to discover one of the many wonders found on the World Wide Web? Then let Mr Webster take you on a journey to virtual reality on the Internet and find that it's full of mad Californians.: [Computimes, , 2* Edition]

IT was a few years ago now that people began to discuss the possibilities of merging the technologies of virtual reality (VR) and the Internet. A fundamental step in this direction was the development of VRML - the virtual reality modelling language.

This established a common language for describing virtual worlds on the Web, allowing them to be viewed on a browser with a plug-in that supports VRML. There are now a number of plug-ins and with the development of the VRML 2.0 standard, several of these also support the richer environments that VRML offers.

For details on the VRML and VRML standards, see the pages on VRML Forum at http://vag.vrml.org/www-vrml, or for real gearheads, The VRML Repository at http://sdsc.edu/vrml. For VRML plug-ins, either Netscape's Live 3-D plug-in from http://www. netscape.com or the ones available for Windows 3.x at http://sdsd.edu/vrml/browsers. html.

Silicon Graphics (www.sgi.com)

If you want to get an idea of where VR on the Web or computer graphics in general might be headed, it's always a good idea to visit the Silicon Graphics site. Recently, SGI has been pushing forth its latest VRML 2.0 plug-in, the Cosmo Player. It's a large download and could take some time to retrieve. But the Cosmo player is one of the most fully featured VRML 2.0 viewers available, allowing you to navigate worlds and get sound and animation.

In order to promote the Cosmo player and VR in general, SGI has devoted a whole section of its site to VRML at http://vrml.sgi .com and also the world's first VR cartoon, depicting the adventures of a cute critter called Floops, available twice a week.

The strength of the Cosmo player is that it supports audio and animation as well as the VR aspects of it. It also enables progressive downloads, in that it can display part of an environment and then carry on retrieving additional elements or external media such as sound. Performance is not good though which makes navigation difficult. But I'm sure that everything runs fine on the US$300,000 (RM900,000) workstations at SGI's California offices, so it's all right then.

Superscape (www.superscape.com)

One of the best known VR companies, Superscape, is very active in bringing VR to the Web with the development of its Viscape plug-in...