Over the subsequent weeks we refined our ideas, and in Oct’95 we had a first draft of a joint paper that was to form the basis of future work. Mitra not only brought his proposal to the table, but also the work of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) groups, who shared the same vision for VRML. This allowed us to quickly begin working together to understand if we could merge our respective draft proposals. Our work was a natural match with Mitra’s and, more importantly, his goals for the long-term development of VRML as a basis for CyberSpace. Mitra had several years experience in the area of multi-user shared environments and was a key member of the VRML community and the VRML Architecture Group (VAG). but soon to set up his own company, WorldMaker. The approach used in our initial proposal was similar in approach to that being suggested by Mitra, then with Worlds Inc. When people began discussing the next phase of VRML’s development on the VRML mailing list, we proposed, in Aug’95, E-VRML as a basis for VRML2.0. Our original foray into the VRML community was based upon the experience we had gained with E-VRML. Here’s our story ……Ī Nice timeline created by Mitra Ardron who co-authored the VRML 2.0 proposal with Sony and the SDSC before we worked with SGIĮxcerpt from Chapter 1 of Java for 3D VRML worlds, by Lea, Matsuda and Miyashita, New Riders Publishing, 1996, ISBN1-56205-689-1 VRML2.0 evolved primarily from Sony’s extensions to VRML1.0 which we called E-VRML and our collaborations with Mitra Ardron at Worldmaker and the folks at the San Diego Supercomputing Centre (SDSC). I went back to a book we wrote at the time on VRML2.0 and dug out the intro chapter which explained VRML’s evolution from our perspective. I realized that in various “re-tellings” our contribution at Sony didn’t play as prominent a role as I thought it deserved. This was brought home to me recently when, as part of a WebGL book I’m co-authoring (see WebGL Programming Guide) I looked back at work I did on VRML2.0 around 1995 and how it has fed into the VRML2.0, X3D, WebGL story. There isn’t one history, rather a collection of narratives that present a perspective on events from particular viewpoints.
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