From: Sandy Ressler <sressler@nist.gov>
Date: August 6, 2003 9:06:38 PM EDT
To: Ivan Poupyrev <poup@csl.sony.co.jp>
Cc: 'Marc Bernatchez' <marc.bernatchez@polymtl.ca>, '3DUI' <3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: Is there any standard in VR?


On Wednesday, August 6, 2003, at 08:35 PM, Ivan Poupyrev wrote:

There was a paper published in 1993 at the IEEE VRAIS conference (now it is
called IEEE VR) that introduced issue of VR standards and why they might be
useful.

Shepherd, B. (1993). Rationale and strategy for VR standards. Proceedings of
VRAIS'93, Seattle, WA., IEEE. Pp 41-46

Personally, I think standards are important only when there is a large and
vibrant market with many companies that need standards to ensure
interoperability and compatibility of their products and components. I am
not sure if VR is close to this stage yet.


I would tend to agree that often premature standardization simply creates a LONG
standardization process which confuses the market. However sometimes the right standard,
if there is a recognized need, can enable the creation of a market. VR has been around for at least 15 years and
IMHO a lack of standards is impeding commercial success. There have been some good commercial
libraries such as the old World Took Kit (don't know if they are still around or not), and standards for device interfaces
would make sense. On the software side there are low level 3D description standards like VRML (soon to be X3D) and OpenGL but higher level user interaction techniques are sorely lacking and it's probably not
a good to work on standards for those, however I can't tell ya how many times I've heard "I want DOOM keyboard
navigation shortcuts". Can't wait to see the makeup of the ISO-DOOM committee ;-)
Sandy


Ivan

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-3dui@hitl.washington.edu
[mailto:owner-3dui@hitl.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Marc Bernatchez
Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2003 12:26 AM
To: 3DUI
Subject: Is there any standard in VR?


Hi all, I'm currently looking for the existence of standards
in the VE/VR
field. Is there such a thing as a VR standard?

I interested in hardware standards as well as software ones.
Specifically,
on the software side, is there any standard yet? Agreed, we
have OpenGL, but
this standard is not directly related to VR. I'm talking
about higher-level
standards for user interface and user interaction (IT's). Things like
standard 3D UI toolkits libraries for VR.

Any info / remark / thoughts will be greatly appreciated.

Regards

Marc Bernatchez
Ph.D. candidate
Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal
CANADA
marc.bernatchez@polymtl.ca



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