By Mark Gibbs
Network World, 7/27/98

Your development team is spread out across the country but has gathered for a virtual meeting hosted on the company intranet. You're standing on a seemingly endless grid surrounded by a vast network diagram.

Upon snapping your virtual fingers, your guide appears. "Bubba," you say, "highlight every variable that won't correctly contain dates greater than or equal to Jan. 1, 2000."

Bubba splits into a depressingly large number of copies, each of which points to a problem variable. Team members sigh in unison. "It's going to be a long night," you say.

Fantasy this isn't - with the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) standard, 3-D design and development tools, and powerful computers, cutting-edge companies might be scheduling such meetings next year. But even today, companies constrained by PC capabilities and communications speeds can reap the benefits of simple virtual environments.

A Web server-based bulletin board makes a great starting point for creating an interactive, virtual environment. At multimedia design firm Kinetix, for example, 45 far-flung developers use O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.'s WebBoard bulletin-board software so they can communicate with each other via the intranet. They use WebBoard to explore difficult questions and problems, for example.

Even at a leading-edge company such as Kinetix, getting users to interact in a virtual environment requires some effort. "It takes a certain kind of person to take advantage of the technology - down-and-dirty stuff still takes place on the telephone or [in-person at] a whiteboard," says Stephen Wiggs, Webmaster at the San Francisco firm.

Wiggs expects the need for face-to-face meetings to drop when he can integrate 3-D images and sound in an application. He wants to use VRML, an ISO standard for describing interactive 3-D environments. "Real virtual worlds are phenomenal. I would use VRML in a second for presenting information and holding meetings if I had the bandwidth!" he says.

His concern is understandable. Kinetix handles a few hundred WebBoard messages, or about a half a megabyte of data, each day. And because WebBoard is text-based, it only takes seconds for employees to access the WebBoard server. They don't need anything more than their browsers.

On the other hand, users who want to view a VRML environment need a plug-in. They'll need patience too: A complex virtual world would require a download of 100K bytes or more.

VRML also poses other problems. Perhaps the biggest one is the need for significant processing power - a 166-MHz Pentium with 16M bytes of RAM gets you barely reasonable performance.

That's where virtual environment software such as Worlds Chat, from Worlds, Inc. in Boston, fits in. The Worlds Chat client will run on PCs powered with as little as a 66-MHz 486 processor.

A Worlds environment might be a highly stylized rendering of an office complex. Employees would be shown as multidimensional avatars and would "talk" via their keyboards. The Worlds Chat server component mediates communications among them.

While software such as Worlds Chat serves a good purpose, VRML is the way to go for those organizations that either have the bandwidth or need greater sophistication. "Key to user involvement is to create an immersive experience, one that the users enjoy and that hides the computer. This is exactly what VRML is good at," says David Colleen, founder of Planet 9 Studios, a 3-D content company in San Francisco.

Colleen points to Schlumberger, Ltd., the enormous oil concern in Sugar Land, Texas. Planet 9 developed a virtual environment, called Knowledge Hub, as a general interface to Schlumberger's vast information resources. Crucial to usability is an information "angel," called Knowah, who follows users in the space and responds to typed queries.

Virtual environments are more than just compelling, Colleen says. "VRML is like a drug. In a year, 90% of users will have 3-D capability without having to install plug-ins, making VRML worlds easier to build and use."