I've started dabbling in VRML worlds again
Now, with modern web browsers and a cool program called "X_ITEX3D" I can display them inside a webpage again.
So here are a few of the recent experiments I've been doing...
plant - experiments in making plants inside VRML [comment]
waves2 - lots of waves tiled together then set in a simple terrain model. It worked out much better than I expected. [comment]
waves - This was a surprisingly baffling problem. I wanted to make animated water for some of my recent worlds [comment]
backgrounds - How I make interesting backgrounds for my VRML worlds [comment] Some of my old VRML worlds
Many years ago I removed my VRML (virtual reality modeling language) worlds from my pages because it had become virtually impossible to view them anymore. I'm finally able to put some of them back online. They are ancient, almost embarrassingly simple virtual worlds, so please be kind. These worlds are so minimalist because they needed to be made using as few polygons as possible in order to avoid bogging down the slow, old computers of that time.
I'm able to put these online again because of a very cool javascript program, "X_ITEX3D", that uses the 3D capabilities built into modern web browsers (it won't work on old web browsers). It converts the VRML information into HTML5 3D information. Very nice!
simple world - This world shows how easy it is to make VRML worlds. It is effectively just 4 lines of text. [comment]
conference room - This was the first shared virtual world I ever built... way back in 1997. It was a multi-user world, where multiple people could meet and we could see each other's avatars. (An avatar is the body you wear in a virtual world so other visitors can see you.) [comment]
happy dog avatar - One of my first avatars, and my favorite to wear in shared VRML worlds. Why "happy"? Pat the dog to find out. [comment]
island - Another of my shared worlds. This one stayed online as a meeting place for many years. Again, as with all these old worlds, the polygon count is deliberately kept as low as possible so as not to overload the old , slow computers of that time (1998). [comment]
snakeCube - My brother gave me a wooden block puzzle in which its 27 blocks are linked together by a rope running through them. The trick is to arrange them so that they form a cube. It is surprisingly difficult. After I solved it a number of times I decided to record a 3D visualisation of the solution. [comment]
sky_island - Be patient. It takes quite a while to load. This was one of my more ambitious worlds, still very low-polygon, because of the old, slow computers of the time, but I tried to do some interesting things with it. See if you can find the secret gallery. I intended to put a lot more in the gallery — more art and another room, but other things took precedence at the time. [comment] I made many more worlds, but probably not worth showing.
So... what should I do now? Should I try making more worlds, now that I can once again show them? And if so, should I try making them much more high-polygon, to suit today's faster computers? [comment]