A nnette Loudon came to California in January of 1994 as an exchange student from her native Australia. While studying creative art at UCSD, she educated herself about the wonders of the then budding World Wide Web. Following a whim, and fleeing finals, she volunteered to demonstrate mosaic at the first Interactive Media Festival in Los Angeles. Following graduation, Annette migrated north, where she began to work for the Arc Gallery, the organization responsible for planning and staging the Interactive Media Festival. At ARC, her contribution quickly accelerated from data entry to full time web designer and HTML programmer. The Arc Gallery Web Site is in many respects the highlight of the Interactive Media Festival. In addition to mundane details of registration and directions, the site featured new media projects from around the globe nominated for consideration for inclusion in the Festival, as well as profiles of the Jury members, and even tools and pointers for HTML tutorials. Due to the disparate geographical locations and time zones of the International jury, discussions and decisions were made in private forum within the web site.Simultaneous with the development of the Arc Gallery web site, two Bay Area programmer/visionaries were on the verge of adding a new dimension to the World Wide Web: a new formatting language called VRML, or Virtual Reality Modeling Language. Until that time, documents for the World Wide Web, referred to as sites, or homepages, had been created with a formatting language called HTML, Hypertext MarkUp Language. HTML creates a 2-dimensional documents with image and text and interlinking capabilities. When Mark Pesche (see Wired VRML, Virtual Reality Modeling Language, created by Mark Pesche (see Wired 3.07) and Anthony Parirsi introduced VRML, the introduced the capability to creates 3-dimensional, navigable "worlds" for the World Wide Web.
In keeping with the Interactive Media Festival's focus of innovative uses of emerging technologies, the artists and programmers at Arc seized the opportunity to implement VRML into the web site. Using the VRML scene rendering language, they created a three dimensional virtual model of the Variety Arts Building where the Interactive Media Festival was scheduled to be held. The VRML version of the Variety Arts followed the physical floor plan faithfully, with exhibits on each floor, and subtle touches like lighting. As much by enthusiasm as necessity, Annette taught found herself learning VRML in the same manner as she had learned HTML. "There was no one who knew it, no one who could teach us, so we taught ourselves as we went along." By looking at the source code of other VRML worlds, (a feature which is also available with HTML documents) and taking advantage of available source code, Annette was instrumental in creating one of the first ever complex VRML worlds.
Annette will continue her involvement in VRML as a member of a start-up company specializing in cutting edge network technology and design. In her precious spare time, she creates and designs arts-related web sites, including YLEM Art on the Edge and UCSD's aRtSlab. Her own art can be found at http://www.art.net, in the visual artist category. Annette can be reached via email at annette@construct.net
More about VRML
Although just in its infancy, VRML is poised to receive the same media hyperattention and consumer addiction that transformed the World Wide Web from an obscure network to the digital version of the Guttenberg publishing revolution in the past year. Locally, at the last VERGE event in July, the Exploritorium amphitheater was packed to capacity for three hours for a Panel discussion on VRML. VRML has generated an incredible stir in the high tech industry, as well as those who are read to seize the opportunity to build 3-dimensional strip malls on the World Wide Web. This young standard is plagued by the usual suspectsÑcorporate interests leaning towards proprietary browsers, strident demands among developers to maintain a standard, and furious debate as to where and how VRML should evolve. In Annette's view, the imperative should be to shift emphasis away from the current fascination with faithful recreation of the real world in s-d modeling. "Ideally, this should be a place to create amazing new worlds, not the same old shit. We should be using the net to bring people together in places where they share ideas and tell people what is going on in their little corners of the world."Learning to VRML
Currently, the main obstacle to accessing VRML is the current deficit of browsers. For the time being (until applications like Netscape and Mosaic choose to implement VRML) a separate browser is necessary to vie w VRML worlds. There is not yet a VRML browser for the Macintosh, but if you are using an SGI, UNIX< Sun OS or even Windows NT, you're in luck- freeware browsers are available at the Web sites below. Don't let lack of access prevent you from learning to VRMLÑaccording to Annette, the key to VRML is looking at the source code of existing worlds. And while Netscape and Mosaic won't render VRML worlds, they will access and show the teachtext files that comprise VRML code.More information about VRML is available from these sites:
The VRML WebsiteVirtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) Forum
The Mesh Mart: Your one stop source for 3-d mesh objects
(includes a list of VRML browsers and editing tools)There is also a VRML mailing list.
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