If you are in the second camp, I assure you that I am not a graphics programmer, I am not a graduate student, and I don’t own a company trying to sell you graphics games or standards. VRML/X3D is designed not to be the fastest language or the easiest to learn, but to sit somewhere in between as the open language for royalty-free (say CHEAP!) 3D on The Web. It may go from bus stop to bus stop but you can’t take it home. On the other hand, you get to do what Linden Labs wants you to do and regardless of the intellectual property policy that says what you create there, you own, you can’t take it with you anywhere else so it is like owning your own baggage in the Greyhound lines terminal.

These provide tools for building in-world or a virtual economy, so once in, you can make some money. In other camps are the closed-system proprietary languages such as are used in platform implementations such as Second Life. On the other hand, VRML/X3D are in the sweet spot between lower level languages like OpenGL which are very powerful but much closer to the metal and require a considerable technical grasp of graphics programming and the higher level languages such as 3DML designed to do a few things well but at the cost of freedom of expression so not very powerful. Then there is X3D which is a step up, but also a bit more complex in terms of multiple encodings and some nasty syntax surprises. It does take practice to learn the basics of VRML. I’ll never be able to do that.īoth camps are right and both camps are wrong. At this point, most of you will be in one of two camps:Ī) That’s trivial and easy.

Freewrl 3.1