The xVRML Project: Building Web-based 3D virtual environments in XML

Jeffrey Sonstein
Information Technology, Rochester Institute of Technology

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     Last modified: May 1, 2005

Abstract
The xVRML Project has brought the software technology for Web-based 3D virtual environments into the age of XML. xVRML is being designed "from the ground up" to support multiuser online virtual environment systems (MOVES), and thus to support group decision-making and cooperative work in virtual environments.

Lessons learned by the author during the development and deployment of VNet (a multiuser online virtual environment system for VRML97 developed in the late 1990's) are being applied to the xVRML design and implementation process. A technology-demonstration viewer application and a scene-editing tool are being developed by graduate students at RIT. This paper and the accompanying workshop focus on helping participants to develop an understanding of the primary issues in constructing online virtual environment scenes, to learn to construct actual scenes, sets, and objects in xVRML, and to deploy these constructions on the World Wide Web.