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

VRML's acceptance as a real business tool will also call for the evolution of what Hardie describes as "some serious marquee relationships": For example, a Web site at Home Depot that runs you through a VRML program for building an addition to your garage and then prints out a shopping list of necessary materials.

VRML will eventually hit prime time. But that won't be next month. Or the month after that.

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Mars Mission

Among the events influencing VRML's future we re the recent images of the Mars mission viewed online by millions' NASA delivered near realtime transmissions from Mars in VRML format on its Web site, drawing millions of hits at its inception. Neil Trevett, VRML president-elect, and VP of marketing for graphics card maker 3D labs Inc., compares this reception to the effect the Gulf War had in bringing CNN into the mainstream. "Some are describing the Mars mission as an event of similar magnitude for the online medium. There no other way that you can communicate that information in such a compelling way," he says.

The NASA site did showcase a VRML banner ad--the first such ad-- picturing a Pepsi can on the Red Planet. While not quite the killer app that VRML enthusiasts await, the ad did show how VRML will gain traction with business users. Other comparable work is beginning to appear. For example, avid inline skaters will soon be able to log-on to Minneapolis-based Rollerblade Inc.'s site and manipulate skates in 360". Since VRML 2.0 allows textures to be mapped to objects, users could even upload their own designs and order custom skates.

The real VRML excitement isn't inside Fortune 500 IS departments, but in small development shops such as Out of the Blue Design Inc., the company that created the Pepsi-on Mars banner ad. "VRML is what I call a digital renaissance because it's really challenging all my concepts of space," says President and CEO Linda Hahner. Since the Italian Renaissance architect Brunelleschi first developed the rules of linear perspective that realistically reduced three dimensions to two, little has changed, notes Hahner. Her realization? Now, for the first time since perspective was invented, 2D can be expanded back to 3D.

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The Bladerunner Influence

In the novel Neuromancer, William Gibson envisioned a 3D Net before most people even knew what "Internet" meant, replete with the cybercowboy navigating the huge expanse: "Still he'd see the matrix in hissleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void." Many enthusiasts envisioned VR as the next big thing, the step up from the GUI interface that revolutionized desktops with 2D graphics and pull-down menus.

But 15 years later, neither Gibson's VR world view nor his dystopian vision of the future--which influenced the movie Bladerunner w has come to fruition. VR is still largely a tenet of writers' imaginations and gaming emporiums such as Cybersmith. Invaluable business tool it's not.

Not yet, anyway. Several market forces are now converging to coax VR technology toward the business world. Three-dimensional applications won't work well without high-powered PC graphics-accelerator cards, and card makers, emboldened by their success with computer gamers, now want to tap lucrative business markets. "We are estimating that for 1998 there'll be 40 million 3D graphics cards in the marketplace worldwide, and all new systems will have some type of hardware acceleration," says Wanda Meloni, senior analyst with Jon Peddie Associates, a San Francisco market research firm. Twenty-three million desktop graphics cards shipped in the first quarter of 1997, an all-time quarterly high.