Low-Rent Virtual Reality with XML
by Tim Bray
January 19, 1999
Late in 1998, with very little fanfare, a very little company named Flatland
Online, Inc., announced a new application of XML: 3DML.
While none of their marketing material actually admits
that 3DML is XML (in fact they claim it's an extension of HTML), their
developers do use the X-word in the technical newsgroups hosted at the
Flatland web site.
3DML, as the name suggests, is a way to encode three-dimensional spaces.
If you'd like to find out about 3DML, you have two choices: you
can branch off here to a nice straightforward
description of what 3DML is all about.
If you're feeling a little bit more adventurous, XML.com has prepared an
introduction to 3DML that's in 3DML. Here's a taste of how it looks to tempt you:
If you want to try this, you'll need first to
download Rover,
Flatland's 3DML browser.
It's only available for Windows - different versions for IE and Netscape.
It seems pretty safe; a couple of downloads of the Netscape version have
worked first time and caused no other system problems.
Once you've installed Rover, it'll probably try to convince you to go to
one of Flatland's own 3DML demos; resist the temptation and learn the
XML-centric way by jumping here.
Once you've been through the demo, you might want to go read
all that boring text about 3DML anyhow.
