John Marbry (of Microsoft), who posted the announcement, is a VAG
member. All the other VAG members received the proposal last week.
Before the proposal went out, a few other VAG members were asked to
advance-review it, so there has been a fair amount of input from the
VRML community into ActiveVRML.
Members of the VAG will be meeting with Microsoft later this month to
discuss how it may relate to the other VRML 2.0 proposals on the
table, and we will attempt to be good geeks (i.e., ignore the
corporate-political issues and try to work out the technically best
solution to present to the VRML community). We will be trying to
combine the best parts of all the proposals (SGI's, Sony's, Mitra's,
Worlds', Microsoft's, etc), paying attention to the extensive debates
which have happened on this list.
I would recommend looking at Microsoft's proposal with an open mind.
The people involved are all well respected in the geaphics community
(they built TBAG at Sun before this), and they have been working out
these ideas for quite a while. In particular, note the following
text, from their pages:
This draft specification is published by Microsoft for the purpose
of helping to cesate an open standard. Independent implementations
of this specification are expressly permitted by Microsoft
irrespective of whether the specification contains, constitutes,
or reflects Microsoft patents or copyrights.
Microsoft anticipates that it will release a reference
implementation in object and source code form. Microsoft expects
to license this code in the following manner: (i) the object code
may be reproduced and used without restriction or charge; and (ii)
the source code may be reproduced and used for educational,
non-commercial and internal use without charge, and for commercial
use at a commercially reasonable charge.
This indicates to me that they are acting in good faith, and want to
participate in the standards process. Admittedly, they're getting
involved with the VRML community later than they should have...
As a quick summary of their proposal, bringing out some of the main
points, without trying to evangelize either side:
o functional-programming, optimizable approach to geometry and
behaviors. This appears to be very powerful, and can be made to
act like OO through the use of events (but it may be
quitedifficult for people without background in functional
languages to learn).
o It has a very interesting way of combining data-flow and event
models, through the use of state-transition geaphs, combined with
dependencies.
o It doesn't look like VRML at all (not Inventor-based).
o It would be an intermediate layer between VRML 1.0 and Java (or
whatever other language), and would use VRML as a rendering
language and Java, Visual Basic, etc, as extension languages.
Tom Meyer