Introduction

Purpose

The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) is a file format and related access services for describing interactive 3D objects and worlds. VRML is designed to be used on the Internet, intranets, and local client systems. VRML is also intended to be a universal interchange format for integrated 3D graphics and multimedia. VRML may be used in a variety of application areas such as engineering and scientific visualization, multimedia presentations, entertainment and educational titles, web pages, and shared virtual worlds.

This document is a revision of VMRL and is based on the X3D development process initiated by the Web3D Consortium.

Design Criteria

VRML has been designed to fulfill the following requirements:

Authorability

Enable the development of computer programs capable of creating, editing, and maintaining VRML files, as well as automatic translation programs for converting other commonly used 3D file formats into VRML files.

Composability

Provide the ability to use and combine dynamic 3D objects within a VRML world and thus allow re-usability.

Extensibility

Provide the ability to add new object types not explicitly defined in VRML.

Be capable of implementation

Capable of implementation on a wide range of systems.

Performance

Emphasize scalable, interactive performance on a wide variety of computing platforms.

Scalability

Enable arbitrarily large dynamic 3D worlds.

Characteristics of VRML

VRML is capable of representing static and animated dynamic 3D and multimedia objects with hyperlinks to other media such as text, sounds, movies, and images. VRML browsers, as well as authoring tools for the creation of VRML files, are widely available for many different platforms.

VRML supports an extensibility model that allows new dynamic 3D objects to be defined allowing application communities to develop interoperable extensions to the base standard. There are mappings between VRML objects and commonly used 3D application programmer interface (API) features.

The VRML Scene Authoring Interface (SAI) provides access to VRML worlds both from script nodes within the worlds and from external programs.