The extensible Virtual Reality Modelling Language
Carina is software project by Dave Huffman, a grad student in the IT Department who is working on the xVRML Project. Dave's goal is for Carina to be a viewer and (possibly) a browser plugin for Virtual Environments. It currently supports much of xVRML.
Carina is being developed under Linux, and uses the QT library from Trolltech and OpenGL. The source for Carina is being released under the GPL, an open-source license arrangement. Dave is developing on his Intel box, but the screen snapshot you see on this page is of Carina running on my old beat-up Mac at home. The Carina Mac port runs as a "native" OS X application. If we can wrangle the money to buy a Windows license from the Trolltech people, we will also develop a Windows port. Supporting Linux, OS X, and Windows wll give us reasonably complete coverage of the machines used by most people.
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Carina is in an early stage of development; think of it as an early "alpha release". It is nice to be able to see xVRML now, thanks to Dave Huffman's work. Carina currently supports a large subset of the xVRML specification's "static" elements (see the Carina site for details).
The screen snapshot of a test scene you see to the right includes objects converted from VRML97 and saved as xVRML, both manual conversions and conversions using the "SaveAs xVRML" function of Carina. The avatar is a conversion of a VRML97 model by Miriam English, the rolltop desk and the chairs are conversions of VRML97 models "donated to the VRML community" by 3Name3D a decade ago, and the rest of the objects were either converted from vrmLab VRML97 models or were created "by hand" in xVRML by Jeff Sonstein. Carina goals include supporting import from formats other than VRML97 and xVRML in the future, accompanied of course by "Save as xVRML" capabilities. This enables authors to easily convert existing object and scene libraries to xVRML.
I have been trying out manual conversions of VRML97 files to xVRML and have been very pleased at how easy it is, but automating the conversion process is very nice for VR authors with libraries and/or complex scenes. Dave has also developed a commandline tool for batch conversions to compliment the "Save as xVRML" capabilities of Carina.
While this is a pre-alpha release of Carina, it does a lot already. Like the old saying goes:
It's not how high the elephant flies that is so amazing, it's that the elephant flies at all.
We are still arm-wrestling over some "picky details" in the current (beta) xVRML specifications; details which emerge as Dave builds this first tech demo xVRML viewer. Dave's focus right now is on completely supporting the "statics" part of the xVRML spec; "dynamics" (like scripts and routing of events) come next. Dave also plans to add support for loading additional 3D file formats, and to create a web-browser plugin set out of Carina to go along with this stand-alone version.
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Page created: 1 December 2004 Page last updated: 16 March 2005 |
The extensible Virtual Reality Modelling Language Project is housed at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, Information Technology Department. This site is maintained by Prof. Jeff Sonstein, a member of the Computer Mediated Experience Group, and is associated with the Center for Information Visualization and Interaction of the RIT Laboratory for Applied Computing.
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Site Created: 12 December 2003 © 2003 - 2005 Jeffrey Sonstein |
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