Vacca provides a wide mix of theoretical and practical information about the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) in all of its early incarnations. This mix includes standards, working groups, software, Web sites, projects, and research into the future of display technology. The book comes with a rich CD-ROM containing samples, Web site information, and VRML tools. By the very nature of the subject, the information is already historical, but it provides important links to measure how Java, Perl, and the other emerging tools for representing reality on the Web should handle user interaction, 3D representation, and the reality factor.

The book can be divided into three parts--a theoretical survey of the field; descriptions of VRML-like projects, including multi-user domain (MUD) object-oriented (MOO) systems; and a large section on implementing the future with VRML standards, including a detailed look at different tools, standards, and requirements for the successful implementation of VRML on the Web.

In chapters 1 through 4, the author deals with the reasons for the popularity of 3D VRML, and why it is necessary for the Web to be able to suspend the disbelief of the audience and become a true environment on the level of an art form. He deals with the emerging VRML standard, in terms of the authoring and viewing tools, as well as planned VRML projects in business, medicine, and other fields. The business usefulness of and requirements for VRML are also explored.

This survey includes five VRML visions--the US Holocaust Museum, the US Library of Congress, Earth, the World-Wide Marketplace, and the Agora and the Senate. These visions are used to discuss ease of use and how 3D VRML can make large data models easier to navigate.

This section concludes with a discussion of the Open Graphics Language (Open GL), upon which VRML is based. The author discusses the requirements for a tool that is going to represent reality, including lighting, realistic shading, buffers for changes, and platform portability.

Chapters 5 through 10, covering VRML implementations and tools, look at various implementations of VRML in software, viewers, projects, and experiments. This discussion is less detailed and is full of personal comments about how well or poorly different functions work. There are quite a few black and white 2D photographs of color 3D images. In some ways, this area of the book reminds me of learning a new language and way of thinking, in that the author attempts to give form to abstract things such as file formats, scene graphs, inventor nodes, CAVE movements and viewpoint, surrogate travel, and immersive technologies.

This section visits sample uses of VRML and illustrates them with state-of-the-art (as of 1994) ways to solve the problems. The author goes on at great length about the contents of scene graphs in the Open Inventor Object-Oriented 3D Toolkit (such as coordinates, bindings, transformations, lights, and cameras). Extensions to Open Inventor include Nodekits, ClipPlanes, DrawStyle, and binary format, all of which are discussed from a user perspective, along with warnings about what does and does not work. Another topic is The Cave, a SIGGRAPH ’94 example using Mosaic and Netscape to browse a 3D VRML cave environment. Another focus is how to immerse the user without cumbersome goggles; the author refers to this as immersive or inline virtual reality. MOO-based collaboration forms a big part of what the author sees as the future of the medium, leading to multiple-party hypertext collaboration on creative and scientific 3D environment projects.

The largest part of the book, “Implementing the Future,” encompasses two parts, “Implementing the Future” and “Results and Future Directions.” For anyone working on a language, or on a project that requires or produces virtual reality or 3D modeling tools, this is required reading. It outlines the issues, functions, and performance requirements for VRML to succeed.

Topics introduced with project summaries in the first part of the book are expanded on. This includes the VRML Architecture Group, Open Inventor, the requirements for a virtual reality modeling language, and an in-depth discussion of the theoretical model for the OpenGL Graphics System. Part 3 of the book takes the implementation further, including adding behavior to VRML events; staging constructs; user interfaces for developers; and the subtleties of virtual behavior engines, including time and concurrency.

Given the nature of standards and specifications, a lot of this book is dry reading, and it will probably serve better as a reference work. Many of the projects and draft standards provide excellent historical records of the state of VRML at an intermediate stage in its development. For people new to VRML, this book can serve as a comprehensive introduction to the terminology and concepts of the field, and as a hint of the types of cultures that will evolve as a result of its full implementation.