Yeah -- I joined the VRML project about two days after it started, and was pretty active for the first year or two. Mark Pesche (sp? that doesn't feel right) and I had an ongoing polite argument in that period, about how the large-scale "world" should be constructed. He was propounding the relatively organized and formal Cyberspace Protocol, I the more chaotic and fluid Portals model. Almost nobody listened to either of us, which I believe is the main reason VRML never proved very useful or interesting.
I have three claims to fame WRT VRML:
1) I named the language. (The initials came before me, but I was the one who pointed out that having them stand for "Virtual Reality Markup Language" was silly, and suggested the change to "Modeling" instead.)
2) I came up with the Portals model, which got implemented by one or two minor companies, and *may* have accidentally influenced the path of rendering tech over the subsequent years. (I like to think that the game Portal is a distant descendant of my ideas, although it's hard to be sure.)
3) I conducted the survey that led to the decision to adopt Inventor as the base language underlying VRML. (Which, in retrospect, was probably a mistake, but hindsight is 20/20.)
I also wrote what may have been the first description of VRML in print -- a chapter in the partially-Carolingian-authored Special Edition Using Java -- although there may well have been others before then.
I remember many of us were trying to use Black Sun as a model.
People are generally shocked to learn that I *still* haven't read the book. I just arrived at somewhat the same place independently. I suspect that my lack of Snow Crash background is part of why I came up with Portals -- I didn't share the common assumption about what the "world" looked like, and so came at it from a very different direction...
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Date: 2008-07-09 11:02 pm (UTC)I have three claims to fame WRT VRML:
1) I named the language. (The initials came before me, but I was the one who pointed out that having them stand for "Virtual Reality Markup Language" was silly, and suggested the change to "Modeling" instead.)
2) I came up with the Portals model, which got implemented by one or two minor companies, and *may* have accidentally influenced the path of rendering tech over the subsequent years. (I like to think that the game Portal is a distant descendant of my ideas, although it's hard to be sure.)
3) I conducted the survey that led to the decision to adopt Inventor as the base language underlying VRML. (Which, in retrospect, was probably a mistake, but hindsight is 20/20.)
I also wrote what may have been the first description of VRML in print -- a chapter in the partially-Carolingian-authored Special Edition Using Java -- although there may well have been others before then.
I remember many of us were trying to use Black Sun as a model.
People are generally shocked to learn that I *still* haven't read the book. I just arrived at somewhat the same place independently. I suspect that my lack of Snow Crash background is part of why I came up with Portals -- I didn't share the common assumption about what the "world" looked like, and so came at it from a very different direction...