Welcome!

This Web site includes the full, updated HTML text for the SIGGRAPH 96 Introduction to VRML 2.0 course notes, along with images, VRML examples, textures, scripts, and sounds.

The following are starting points for reading through the course materials:

All chapters, talk slides, and examples are fully linked.

Course Materials Archives

Instead of browsing these course materials on-line, you are encouraged to instead download one of the following archives. Each archive contains all course materials files.

vrmlarch.zip (3.7MB) - PC zip archive
vrmlarch.sea (3.7MB) - Macintosh sea archive
vrmlarch.tar (4.7MB) - UNIX tar archive

To use these archives, copy the appropriate archive to your system and expand it.

On the PC, you can use pkzip, WinZip, or any similar application to extract the files from the zip archive.
On the Macintosh, the archive is self-extracting. Just double-click the archive and it will expand on its own.
On UNIX systems, you can use uncompress to uncompress the archive, and tar to extract the archive files.

Archived files are identical for PC, Macintosh, and UNIX systems.

What Else You'll Need

In addition to these course materials, you will need:

An HTML browser. We recommend Netscape's Navigator 3.0, available from Netscape at www.netscape.com.
A VRML browser or plug-in. We used Cosmo Player from Silicon Graphics to develop most of these examples. We also used Sony's CyberPassage. Information on Cosmo is available from SGI at vrml.sgi.com. Information on CyberPassage is available from Sony at vs.sony.co.jp.

You can obtain information on available VRML software at The VRML Repository at www.sdsc.edu/vrml.

Caveats

The VRML 2.0 specification finalized August 4th, two days before the SIGGRAPH 96 course. At the time of the course, no VRML 2.0 browsers existed that fully supported all features in the finalized specification. We used an unreleased beta of SGI's Cosmo Player during the course presentation, and carefully avoided using features we knew would crash Cosmo Player.

Several early VRML 2.0 browsers are publically available as of this writing, but all support Draft #2 VRML syntax, which differs here and there from the final VRML 2.0 syntax. The examples in this course are compliant with the Final VRML 2.0 syntax. As a result, these examples will not work with older Draft #2 compliant browsers. You will need to await the release of final VRML 2.0 syntax compliant browsers before being able to use some of the examples in these course materials.