VRML History: Storing And Browsing Temporal 3D-Worlds

Abstract

Spatio-temporal data are presented and explored by VR-based visualization systems which offer 3D-navigation and time-navigation for better immersion and analysis. If the visualization results are disseminated on the WWW, they are mostly transformed into videos or, recently, into animated VRML-files which neither support 3D-navigation nor time navigation nor a time-referenced data representation. In this paper, the script language VRML History is proposed which supports the description of spatio-temporal worlds on the internet by conceptually extending VRML with a new time dimension. This is realized by a set of new nodes representing temporal geometries and time references, and a set of Java-classes extending standard VRML-browsers to perform time navigation.