Vrml Format

[Zareen Zapata]

VRML is a text file format where, e.g., vertices and edges for a 3D polygon can be specified along with the surface color, UV-mapped textures, shininess, transparency, and so on.[2][3] URLs can be associated with graphical components so that a web browser might fetch a webpage or a new VRML file from the Internet when the user clicks on the specific graphical component. Animations, sounds, lighting, and other aspects of the virtual world can interact with the user or may be triggered by external events such as timers. A special Script Node allows the addition of program code (e.g., written in Java or ECMAScript) to a VRML file.

VRML files are commonly called "worlds" and have the .wrl extension (for example, island.wrl). VRML files are in plain text and generally compress well using gzip, useful for transferring over the Internet more quickly (some gzip compressed files use the .wrz extension). Many 3D modeling programs can save objects and scenes in VRML format.

The Web3D Consortium has been formed to further the collective development of the format. VRML (and its successor, X3D), have been accepted as international standards by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).

The first version of VRML was specified in November 1994. This version was specified from, and very closely resembled, the API and file format of the Open Inventor software component, originally developed by SGI. Version 2.0 development was guided by the ad hoc VRML Architecture Group (VAG).[4] A working draft was published in August 1996.[5] Formal collaboration between the VAG and SC24 of ISO/IEC began in 1996[6] and VRML 2.0 was submitted to ISO for adoption as an international standard. The current and functionally complete version is VRML97 (ISO/IEC 14772-1:1997). VRML has now been superseded by X3D (ISO/IEC 19775-1).

The term VRML was coined by Dave Raggett in a paper called "Extending WWW to support Platform Independent Virtual Reality"[7] submitted to the First World Wide Web Conference[8] in 1994, and first discussed at the WWW94 VRML BOF established by Tim Berners-Lee, where Mark Pesce presented the Labyrinth demo he developed with Tony Parisi[9] and Peter Kennard.[10] VRML was introduced to a wider audience in the SIGGRAPH Course, VRML: Using 3D to Surf the Web[11] in August 1995. In October 1995, at Internet World, Template Graphics Software (TGS) demonstrated a 3D/VRML plug-in for the beta release of Netscape 2.0 by Netscape Communications.[12]

SGI ran a web site at vrml.sgi.com on which was hosted a string of regular short performances of a character called "Floops" who was a VRML character in a VRML world. Floops was a creation of a company called Protozoa.[15][16]

VRML has never seen much serious widespread use.[18] One reason for this may have been the lack of available bandwidth.[19] At the time of VRML's popularity, a majority of users, both business and personal, were using slow dial-up Internet access.

VRML experimentation was primarily in education and research where an open specification is most valued.[20] It has now been re-engineered as X3D. The MPEG-4 Interactive Profile (ISO/IEC 14496) was based on VRML[21] (now on X3D), and X3D is largely backward-compatible with it. VRML is also widely used as a file format for interchange of 3D models, particularly from CAD systems.[22]

A free cross-platform runtime implementation of VRML is available in OpenVRML. Its libraries can be used to add both VRML and X3D support to applications, and a GTK+ plugin is available to render VRML/X3D worlds in web browsers.

In the 2000s, many companies like Bitmanagement improved the quality level of virtual effects in VRML to the quality level of DirectX 9.0c, but at the expense of using proprietary solutions. All main features like game modeling are already complete. They include multi-pass render with low level setting for Z-buffer, BlendOp, AlphaOp, Stencil,[23] Multi-texture,[24] Shader with HLSL and GLSL support,[25] realtime Render To Texture, Multi Render Target (MRT) and PostProcessing.[26] Many demos shows that VRML already supports lightmap, normalmap, SSAO, CSM and Realtime Environment Reflection along with other virtual effects.[27]

In a March 1998 ACM essay, "Playfulness in 3D Spaces -- Why Quake is better than VRML, and what it means for software design", Clay Shirky sharply criticised VRML as a "technology in search of a problem", whereas "Quake does something well instead of many things poorly...The VRML community has failed to come up with anything this compelling -- not despite the community's best intentions, but because of them. Every time VRML practitioners approach the problem of how to represent space on the screen, they have no focused reason to make any particular trade-off of detail versus rendering speed, or making objects versus making spaces, because VRML isn't for anything except itself. Many times, having a particular, near-term need to solve brings a project's virtues into sharp focus, and gives it enough clarity to live on its own."[28]

VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) was originally known before 1995 as the Virtual Reality Markup Language. It is a standard file format for representing 3-dimensional (3D) interactive vector graphics, designed particularly with the World Wide Web in mind.

VRML is a text file format where, e.g., vertices and edges for a 3D polygon can be specified along with the surface color, UV mapped textures, shininess, transparency, and so on. URLs can be associated with graphical components so that a web browser might fetch a webpage or a new VRML file from the Internet when the user clicks on the specific graphical component. Animations, sounds, lighting, and other aspects of the virtual world can interact with the user or may be triggered by external events such as timers. A special Script Node allows the addition of program code (e.g., written in Java or ECMAScript) to a VRML file.

VRML files are commonly called "worlds" and have the *.wrl extension (for example island.wrl). VRML files are in plain text and generally compress well using gzip, useful for transferring over the internet more quickly (some gzip compressed files use the *.wrz extension). Many 3D modeling programs can save objects and scenes in VRML format.

Note by mod: Moved from original topic as this spawned a lengthy (but interesting) discussion
I also sadly screwed up the ordering in the move so the true top post is: KiCad will support compressed step and vrml models in the future

Please test the effect on loading times on Windows, it is possible that antivirus engines might try decompressing the entire library on the fly and make KiCad loading and installation even more painful

Like it or not Windows has weaknesses in dealing with opening huge numbers of files. KiCad developers should at least try not to make things worse.
If the compressed version is not slower, I am all for reducing the size, as 3D models will only increase in number

In computing there is always a tradeoff between size and computation effort. For 3d models we might just choose the former as a default and offer a script as i described for people who have the hard disc space and want the latter.

Compression should improve loading time from HDD for sure. Time for loading smaller size file and decompress it should be less than loading much bigger uncompressed file. As we all know small file occupy whole sector on disk so a massive numbers of files can waste some disk space as well. It will be good if Kicad could compress multiple files into one zip file, for example like jar files in java.

In 1995, VRML became the first web based 3D format. VRML was unique because it supported 3D geometry, animation, and scripting. In 1997, VRML was ISO certified and continued to attract a large following of artists and engineers. VRML is the most widely supported 3D format for tools and viewers.

In 2001, X3D joined our family as an XML encoding of VRML. X3D added shaders, geo-location, and other cutting edge 3D features along with custom support for users in medicine, CAD, GIS, AR/VR, 3D Printing and Scanning and other important use areas.

The X3D 4.0 spec is available to members for over a year in github; we released a public draft at Web3D/SIGGRAPH 2019. It is the focus of much discussion among the WG meetings and listerves. The X3D WG has a feature freeze for Dec and we go to ISO-IEC ratification early in 2020. X3D 4.0 includes the ability to compose scenes with glTF 2.0 assets. As you know X3D is a higher level scene graph that describes many geometry types, lights, interactions, animations, etc. Here is the latest version of the Blog, that includes links to examples: -integrating-x3d-and-gltf

Over two decades of graphics innovation and community have proven the durability of declarative Standards for Web3D content and the Standard scene graph. The steady progress of royalty-free, publically-available Web3D ISO-IEC Standards demonstrates the value of interactive 3D content compatible with the WWW. X3D is forward-compatible with VRML; this means that the interactive 3D worlds built before GPUs, Broadband, or Linux run even faster today. As enterprises realize that getting serious about 3D data requires a strategy longer than Silicon Valley cycles, Standards become central. From infrastructure such as urban and rural development, to power, to scientific results and resources for education, to medical records for a lifetime, the value and investment is clearly in the interoperability and portability of 3D data and scenes.

As new technologies and features stabilize, Standards evolve. The not-for-profit Web3D Consortium is the vehicle for developing and standardizing new extensions and functionalities to the ISO-IEC VRML, H-Anim, and X3D Standards. The Extensibility of VRML and X3D has been proven over 25 years of academic papers where leading-edge graphics techniques have been developed, tested, and proposed for standardization. X3D yields 20,200 documents in Google Scholar and 4,440 in Semantic Scholar; VRML yields 84,600 documents in Google Scholar and 13,100 in Semantic Scholar. Since the specifications work through the Web3D Consortium and the ISO-IEC process, the Standards technology is vetted and ratified by experts from around the world.

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