Posted by ^reaper^ on 08/25/05 06:43

While sipping absinthe, Mimic heard a loud sucking noise coming from
alt.2600, and hastily inscribed the following unintelligible Sanskrit in
<news:rOednVirT5DfipDeRVnyrA@pipex.net>:

> ^reaper^ wrote:
>
>> While sipping absinthe, Mimic heard a loud sucking noise coming from
>> alt.2600, and hastily inscribed the following unintelligible Sanskrit in
>> <news:HZGdnV92RcmCIZHeRVnyjw@pipex.net>:
>>
>>>hrmm so aside from all the plotting. Can you use GIS to produce 3D
>>>enviroments based on real world geodata?
>>
>> Oh, definitely. For a taste, go here: http://vrmlworks.crispen.org and
>> click on teh worlds link, then scroll down a bit to the "real places"
>> heading. Some of the vr is decent. And most of it beats teh chit,
>> bandwidth-wise, compute-wise, and anim-wise out of flash 3d emuls.
>>
>
> hrmm Ill have to ook into it some more then I GIS [see what I did there
> ;)] ... most of those links are dead heh.

Really? Okay, I haven't been to that site in awhile. o_O

> I see how you'd build up natural terrain into 3 dimensional models, but
> how do you do the interior designs and city scapes, surely you would
> have to go out with some laser oojimafip to get all the dimensions and
> what not..?

You're talking bout raytracing, right? If so, yes, you could go that route.
It's definitely nice for high refraction or highly reflective surfaces,
such as glass, liquids, and metals, respectively. As far as solids go, say,
you're wanting to build a walk-around of your area. The most efficient way,
is to either snag or create various textures (e.g. brick, wood, stucco,
etc). The common approach for web-based vr is a combo with protos and
textures. Or you could always raytrace the whole thing (which generally
results in very nicely detailed vr), however it dramatically increases
client computes. Whichever you choose, you'll prolly need 'working' doors,
and various other event related anims. This would involve adding event
listeners, timers, routes, and xlation nodes. The event handler is
ECMAScript.

Btw, if you wanna play, here's a site that provides example protos:

http://web3d.vapourtech.com/

As far as browser plugins go, there are a variety of flavors. And they all
have their pros/cons. Their support ranges from teh newer x3d (which is
basically xml wrapped vrml) to vrml 1.0 & 2.0 clients. For example, flux
for x3d, is attempting to break into teh market, but it seems to be quite
bulky (which basically xlates to slow). Then again, it could be teh impls,
as those that I checked out had fairly large and complex footprints.
Blaxxun is geared more towards mugs and muws (multiuser games & multiuser
worlds), so they provide a nice api, whereas cortona provides some
interesting fx protos. Blaxxun runs on linux & windoze, whereas cortona
only works with handhelds, mac, and windows. There's also swerve for
handhelds and macweb3d for mac. And, if you want to avoid selecting vrml
type plugins altogether, you can always go teh java3d route. Though, even
then, you have to consider potential issues, such as your users' video
cards. Whereas teh former has builtin suppport for directx and opengl. As I
said, pros/cons. ^_~

--
^reaper^

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