http://www.sgi.com/Headlines/1995/April/vrml.html (Einblicke ins Internet, 10/1995)
Silicon Graphics announced today that it has teamed with Template Graphics Software, Inc. to develop and distribute WebSpace, the first commercially-available 3D viewer for the World Wide Web. The two companies will make WebSpace available for all major UNIX® platforms, Microsoft Windows, Windows NT and Power Macintosh® systems.
Today's news follows other announcements made last week with Sybase, Inc. and Adobe Systems Incorporated. On March 28, Silicon Graphics announced a strategic initiative with Sybase that will enable personalized marketing on the World Wide Web, including the ability to instantly create home pages customized to match the interests of individual Web surfers. The company also announced that it will bundle Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator software to Silicon Graphics'® WebFORCE Indy and Indigo2 workstations for authoring Word Wide Web content. Silicon Graphics and Adobe are also working together to bring Adobe's Acrobat technology to the Silicon Graphics platform.
"The promise of the World Wide Web will be realized if the greatest number of people have access to the most compelling technologies," said Tom Furlong, vice president and general manager of Silicon Graphics' Digital Sight and Sound Division. "The Web turned the Internet visual, and now Silicon Graphics is using its technological expertise to transform the Web into a media-rich, dynamic and interactive 3D environment-accessible to all users in offices, homes, schools and research facilities around the world."
"3D presents a powerful new paradigm shift that will change the face of the World Wide Web," said Way Ting, vice president and general manager of Silicon Graphics' Visual Magic Division. "The WebSpace viewer and combined efforts of Silicon Graphics and Template Graphics Software, provides just the right technology mix to make 3D pervasive and broadly accessible to the Web."
The WebSpace viewer supports Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), an open, platform-independent file format for 3D graphics on the internet. Similar in concept to the core Web text standard HyperText Markup Language (HTML), VRML encodes computer-generated graphics into a compact format for transportation over the network. As with HTML, a user can view the contents of a file--in this case an interactive 3D graphics file--as well as navigate to other VRML "worlds" or HTML pages. In addition, VRML is infinitely scaleable so that as users navigate through virtual worlds and approach objects, greater levels of detail emerge.
Seventeen companies and organizations today also announced their support for VRML-based 3D graphics on the World Wide Web. These companies include: AccelGraphics, Inc., Brown University, CERN, Digital Equipment Corporation, Intergraph, NCD, NEC Technologies, net.Genesis Corporation, Netscape Communications, Oki Advanced Products, San Diego Supercomputer Center, Spyglass, Tenet Networks, Viewpoint Datalabs International, Inc., the University of Darmstadt, Wavefront Technologies and 3Dlabs Inc.
The WebSpace viewer was developed with the Open Inventor object-oriented 3D toolkit. Based on the industry standard OpenGL application programming interface, Open Inventor dramatically simplifies 3D graphics programming. Template Graphics is a licensee of the Open Inventor toolkit and provides it for all non-Silicon Graphics UNIX, Windows, and Macintosh systems.
Beta versions of the WebSpace viewers will be available on the Web by the end of April. Non-supported versions of the viewers will be available at no charge and will be downloadable from several public ftp sites on the World Wide Web including web sites from Silicon Graphics ( http://www.sgi.com) and Template Graphics Software. Template Graphics Software will also offer supported versions for $49.
Here is more information on WebSpace
