Wave Issue 9610 10/11/96 Article 8-01

***VREAM Goes VRML
by David Lohse

Founded in 1991 in the midst of the promising VR industry, VREAM's
objectives were to "bring virtual reality to the mass market." Although
there were no obvious inroads to achieve this objective for their first
several years, 1995 saw the emergence of VRML. With the promise of
bringing 3D/VR to the consumer, VRML was fully embraced by VREAM: they
first released WIRL, a plug-in VRML 1.0 browser for Navigator or IE, in
May of 1995, and have since concentrated on making all of their products
fully VRML-compliant. Asked whether he thought VREAM could be considered
a "VRML company," Ken Gaebler, VREAM's Vice President of Sales and
Marketing, replied, "totally."

In the last issue of WAVE (#609, 9/27), we mentioned that WIRL is bundled
with Matrox's consumer 3D cards; in addition, however, WIRL is also
bundled with ATI's cards and according to Ken, VREAM is currently in
negotiations with both Number 9 Technologies and Creative Labs, with
similar bundling deals expected by November.

In addition to their WIRL browser, VREAM's cornerstone product is their
VRCreator authoring software. With version 2.0, due for release in
November, VRCReator ($99) will be one of the first VRML 2.0 authoring
programs on the market. Although it boasts complete VRML 2.0 support and
fully functional capabilities, VRCreator is targeted at the non-
programmer developer, offering easy drag & drop management (including a
library of over 1,000 items) and intuitive interfaces. Following in the
trend arguably started by Paragraph, VRML tools are becoming increasingly
user-friendly, especially compared to the early days of primitive and
difficult hand-coding, and VRCreator provides yet another link in this
chain.

VRCreator's most unique feature, however, is its adoption of VREAMScript,
VREAM's proprietary scripting language. Although many in the industry
bemoan proprietary extensions, prophesizing that they will be the
downfall of VRML, VREAMScript does offer the important benefit of ease-
of-use, allowing non-programmers and (fairly) typical consumers to
integrate behaviors and self-styled animations into their VRML scenes.
Unfortunately, currently only WIRL browsers can utilize VREAMScript-based
scenes, which is exactly the type of fragmentation that VRML pundits fear
from proprietary extensions. This will be remedied in March 1997 with the
release of VRCreator 3.0, which promises to offer Java export
capabilities for VRScipts, at which time the utility of VRScript will
come into play as a further level of abstraction from the lower-level
Java language.

www.vream.com