way ting from Silicon Graphics Inc (SGI) introduced his "new vision of the World Wide Web".
way ting started with a breathtaking tour through a virtual reality museum. SGI has developed a new WWW browser with 3D capabilities, which allowed way ting to approach the museum from far a way. as we got closer, we could recognize more details and we finally entered the virtual building through its front door. we found various objects in the museum. with a simple click on an object, we could get more detailed information about it. and of course, we could view the objects from any angle.
also the performance was astounding. but there was a simple explanation: all data was copied to the local machine ! i guess, if the various objects were distributed all over the Internet, the performance would be slightly different. to reduce network traffic, not all information about each object is transmitted at once. instead, as one approaches a virtual object, more details are transmitted.
the whole 3D approach is based on VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language). VRML is still under development. there are draft specifications available as well as public source code for QvLib, a parser library for VRML.
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