Virtual reality gets less virtual - advances in VRML, graphics processing power make technology accessible to businesses - incudes related articles on NASA site for Mars mission, science-fiction influence on industry - Technology Information

Software Magazine, Dec, 1997 by Matthew Schwartz

Another strong example of VRML doing serious duty is on view at Mincom Pty. Ltd., in Teneriffe, Australia, a developer of software used to visualize mining surveys. Mincom is eliminating the need for expensive proprietary mapping and viewing equipment by using VRML on the desktop. The viewing end gets less expensive, and almost any desktop can view the information. The drawback? The VRML image has less detail. The technology's effect on Mincom's bottom line is unclear, but its appeal to customers is considerable: They can much more easily access visual representations and obtain information about drill sites.

Business Toehold

That leverage with customers may be what gives VRML its strongest toehold in business applications. That's how it appears at Computer Associates, whose Unicenter TNG enterprise product for network management includes a 3D component. Although its 3D is built in proprietary code, the fact that Unicenter TNG's next interface will support VRML illustrates the language's applicability for marrying data to the Web.

TNG works like this: At the uppermost level of view, its "real-world interface" displays a network geographically. If a customer's two networks are in Cairo and San Francisco, they could be represented by a pyramid and the Golden Gate Bridge. If there's a red dot over the pyramid, there's a problem at some level within that network. By clicking on the pyramid, then following the dot through successive levels, the user "flies" through graphical representations: first down to the pyramid, then over to the east building, then into an image of its network, through the different divisions, into a LAN group, into a PC whose top peels away, and finally down to the faulty Ethernet card. With the problem identified, a repair can be initiated.

Users can both create their own icons and group information as they choose, allowing a variety of approaches to looking at the same data. While Unicenter TNG currently runs in C , Computer Associates announced in September that it was beginning to test a Java interface that could also provide information in VRML for browsers.

Some observers point out that experienced network administrators -- the most typical users of a product such as Unicenter w don't need three dimensions to understand their networks, and it's certainly not what they'll turn to in a crisis;

But Unicenter TNG's 3D interface turns out to be highly useful in other ways, as Exodus Communications Inc. can attest. The data center company uses TNG to help manage its 4,000 servers, based in centers in Jersey City, N.J., New York City, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. A single customer can have 300 servers set up with Internet applications at an Exodus data center; Exodus manages their applications and systems. "What we would like to do is get the VRML interface and give it to our customers to go see their systems," says Prabakar Sundarrajan, director of R&D. Users can currently view their networks through a TNG interface, but they have to log-on through an NT client with a 3D activator board. Learning and scaling TNG, he reports, has 4 been a non-issue: Exodus just creates a new icon for a new group of servers. "The real learning curve was the step-up effort to get our own objects in there," says Sundarrajan. After that, the program arranged the icons and kept track of them.