RE: [www-vrml] Tim BL Is Baffled, Too Looooooonnnngggggg

["Clayton Cottingham" <drfrog@telus.net>]

its times like this im glad i did just re-read neuromancer...that i can walk through the same city as william gibson and envision that 'possbile' direction...that i can calmly sit down and pick up the copy of marc pesce's vrml:browsing and building cyberspace (1995) ... coincedentally with Tim BL's foreward {OCR is wonderful see attached}

 

this is a very different tone in this foreward, talking about the same subject, as opposed to this threads article

 

I'm glad i can recall passionate discussions with all of you, nothing ever personal , although things do get heated {len are you on crack :P)...first and foremost in my mind was the vision of VR...my feeling then as it is now is that vrml/x3d is the conduit for this

 

i recall sending tony a thank you / congratulations on making his worldview vrml1 and vrml2 browsers....viewing the first world and of course building my first world

 

this stuff is important to me... it is with unbridled passion that i make my remarks

 

and as i said to my friend last night when thinking about it all:

'its easier to point to the problems than it is to find solutions'

 

im going to address the questions neil asks and then keep rambling

 

 

so the one question is

how do you engage the community

 

the other is

what does the consortium need to do to improve

 

engaging the community is as easy as allowing them to have access...

 

case in point is the browser work group

i dont know whom else to say championed the idea more than me that they were gonna sit down and talk ..gleeful you bet!

 

little did i realize it was going to be behind close doors, with no forum for us vermin to help/aid in that process

 

all that energy ended up accomplishing what? not even a percentile of interoperability , a let down? you bet!

 

engage the community? back in the day workgroups were fine to just join and help......

 

i was very interested in helping with the db workgroup until it started being controlled by oracles way of interfacing.. no clear consensus or forethought about how this was going to work with any other database...let alone operating system

 

 

engage the community indeed...we are still here, regardless of the consortium... who here would stop programming vrml/x3d if the consortium failed tomorrow? none of us! And thats something you should think hard about....the consortium exists amongst us... not above

 

 

what does the consortium need to do to improve......?

 

seriously i think its a dead end.. i really am begining to think VRML would have been better served by being a part of the w3c consortium

 

I dont understand the intimate financial details of the consortium, but every point you make neil seems to have the taint of fiscal responsibility all over it

 

i really dont see how there is this big need for money to make this work, we were fine before , what has changed?

 

other organizations seem to be doing fine, so look at what works ,there are tonnes of workable models to choose from, from open source to non-profits

 

I have constantly said that the consortium need to watch dog the companies for proper usage, spec interpretation, deployment and interoperabiity..they the consortium needs a reference browser/plugin for vrml or x3d, much like w3c has for html

 

i have constantly said that better marketing is needed, we have to educate the market, we need 3d on web3d.org

for a site dealing with 3d online... it seems pretty funny there isnt a lick of it on the site

 

thats considered bad marketing

:|

 

 

ok i dont want this to be taken hard ..its so far gone it spilt milk to me but i want you all to think about this and see what you think about this

 

when i made that perl script that used don brutzmans xslts and was able to generate vrml output from x3d when a x3d browser wasnt available yet i was asked by the consortium if they could put it on the site

 

cool stuff...right ?anybody would be overjoyed? sure as shootin i sure was

 

so yeah its up there in the membership area... no one can see or use it unless you have a membership

 

suddenly im cut off and obviously  a lil disgruntled

 

yes sometimes things seem a bit personal....

 

so over and over again i have seen example after example of bad treatment to the community at large by the consortium, and

 

these are just off the top of my head

 

 

 

 

Bafflement:

 

interoperability is inextricably linked to deployment issues

 

if people get fed up with setting something up they go away, and usually dont return

 

how many times have i missed out on a contract b/c i couldnt get a plugin to install and work?

anyone else????

 

the chasm you refer to is smaller than you think

i know lots of vermin are creating worlds for scientific and medical use...the gap isnt that big and its continually shrinking

 

 

regarding membership:

I dont see the need for me to make membership, what use will it give me?

 

i dont see it, I guess the only reason would be to put my money where my mouth is and run for a position on the BoD

:D:D:D

 

as purely a developer though, i dont see the need to do this..

as an html developer i dont see the need to join the w3c right?

 

sure, if i want to submit a proposal yeah i do.....but  i am here to find solutions to programming vrml/x3d

more and more often these solutions are market and financially driven.. not driven by the force of vr itself, sad isnt it?

 

 

Neil, you look forward with hope .. you hope someone somewhere will make this happen.

 

Neil, as the president of the web3d consortium it falls to you to provide some sort of leadership in this area

 

the point is that the consortium should be helping us get there, im fighting for it constantly, as should be obvious by now, and believe me its also with fasination and disappointment these thing cycle around to the same issues

 

why is that? do we need an organizational pschyologist?

 

why is it the visionaries and leader of vrml past have left?

 

a lot of bad blood was spilt on the specs and it has tainted them 

 

we all seem to know the fuzzy reasons why they left its got to do with vision verses money...and that is a sad legacy

 

but thats ancient history

 

 

 

 

ok gotta cacth up to thread

 

 

 

ok i gotta catch up on the thread now!

 

Foreword
The Web is often described as the space consisting of all network accessible information.

The word "space" is used in an abstract way, but people seem
to feel more at home in a hyperspace when it has some of the properties of the real space they are used to. Frans Koesel's early Web of the Vatican Library's exhibit of the Renaissance in Rome, apart from being filled with beautiful pictures, was a success because it kept to a geographical metaphor. The visitor could look at a map of the museum site, take a "bus" to a pavilion, or enter halls and rooms. Introductory text was provided on this journey, so that by the time the visitor was staring at an illuminated manuscript, he or she had some idea of what it was all about.

Virtual reality takes the whole process further, using three dimensions to connect directly with our brains' abilities to handle spatial data with power and familiarity. It is so natural for us to be immersed in a three-dimensional space that we might expect more of the warp and weft of the Web to provide the basic navigation between its resources, woven in VRML rather than HTML.

In May of 1994, the First International WWW Conference was held at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. At that conference, David Raggett and I held a small "birds of a feather" session in order to kick the Web in the direction of 3D. We felt that although few users had the power of 3D workstations, it was time we had a common language for at least describing simple 3D scenes. The idea was that different representations of 3D and 2D objects could be mixed within one scene. According to its ability for handling each object, a browser program would be able to choose a representation that it could handle, compromising between speed and resolution. Mark Pesce-the author of this book, and already a dabbler in 3D hyperspace-was there, and rapidly formed a small group of enthusiasts to follow up the idea, under Dave's "VRML" label. The result seems to have met with almost universal acceptance. Only a year later, there is a specification to which everyone can design. The World Wide Web Consortium will be working with Mark to ensure that a well-defined standard exists, both at its current level and in the future.

Less than a year after the first conference, the third WWW conference was held in Darmstadt, Germany. A packed plenary session was thrilled by demonstrations of fly-throughs of 3D scenes painted in VRML. Kevin Hughes, a graphic artist and early Web pioneer, rose to his feet and declared the beginning of a new era.

Mark is to be congratulated on his balancing of vision and practicality to make this big step so cleanly. A new era does not come without a certain amount of hard work.

Tim Berners-Lee

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1995