Late Night VRML 2.0 with Java

Book Cover Authors: Bernie Roehl, Justin Couch, Tim Rohaly, Cindy Reed-Ballreich, Geoff Brown
Publisher: Ziff-Davis Press (Macmillan)
Date: May 1997
ISBN: 1562765043
Purchase: Amazon

My last VRML effort and the one that I am most proud of. If you want to know anything about how to do real stuff with VRML and Java this has got to be the book for you. The book starts by assuming that you know both VRML and Java and then takes you on a trip from there.

We cover the advanced VRML stuff like the event model, scripting, external API and spend a good proportion of the book discussing and implementing a Multiuser VRML system. That is not all we cover - Texture Mapping by texture girl herself Cindy Reed-Ballriech, Sound by the guy who wrote the VRML section - Geoff Brown and Tim Rohaly kicks in with a number of chapters for things like NURBs surfaces and the rest. We build file convertors for Quake (Yup, you guessed it - VRML Quake!), VRML debuggers, add Joystick support to VRML browsers and many more things.

Today, the book is starting to get a little long in the tooth. For example, Liquid Reality, which was written by DimensionX, was quashed when Microsoft purchased them. Bernie and I would really love to do an updated version of the book, but it really hasn't been selling enough to get the publishers interested. :( (This is a general problem with all VRML books actually).

About the Crew

When I first applied to do the book an arrangement was made to work on a collaborative effort with Bernie. In the words of the publisher, we were told they wanted a no-limits advanced VRML book. To do this we found the best people that we could to cover the various parts of VRML specification - the specialists.

For this, we recruited Cindy Reed-Ballreich for the texture mapping stuff. Cindy, as a modeller and animator for 3Name3D was the first lady of VRML. She'd been in the business for a long time as the sole female voice in amongst the thousands of males. That did not deter her as she quickly became known as the Texture Mapping lady for her great VRML texture mapping tutorials. She was our first pick.

Next on the list was Tim Rohaly. Tim was the tech editor on the book to start with, however his long time behind the scenes involvement in VRML as teacher and mentor meant he had to be involved. Of all the work I've written, this guy had to be the most thorough tech editor of all time. Really kept us on the ball.

Finally, we needed someone to look after the sound part. Bernie and I are both musicians (Cindy I hear plays a mean Bass too) but when it comes to 3D sound, nobody knew it better than Geoff Brown. He wrote most of the sound portion of the VRML 2.0 spec so I guess you could call him the expert!

There's a long running in joke between the authors. None of us have ever actually met Tim in the flesh. We've had the entire group together on a number of occasions, except for Tim. Our current theory is that he is a highly evolved Bot that was fine tuned for 3D graphics work and that all the other team members except the one speaking at the time got all his money for the contributions.

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Book Updates

This section is devoted to updating you on changes that have occurred to the book as a result of the evolution of VRML. Here I'll only be presenting the changes in my contributions to the book as I'll let the other authors speak for themselves.

Since the majority of the book is devoted to interactive VRML, the heart of this is the event model. For this, I have a separate page that deals with the latest updates. Note that this is common across a number of my scrawlings so it may be more general than what was originally presented in the book.

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