Introduction to VRML 2.0
Unlike HTML to author VRML worlds by hand (I mean writing them in a text editor) is hard by its 3 dimensional nature. To create complex geometry you will need an "authoring tool", but this tutorial will not include any reference to one. The goal of this document to show you the possibilities of VRML by examples using simple geometry, to make it easy for you to understand the ways of interaction, scripting and animaton. Hopefully this tutorial will give you the power to "fine-tune" 3D worlds created in any authoring software, to create interactive moving worlds which use more extensively the capabilities of VRML2.0.
In other words, you can easily replace the simple shapes included in the examples with complex geometry created in a modelling software, giving more sophisticated behaviors to them.
The tutorial is far not complete, what you can find here is only the 0.000001 version, it is absolutely under construction: comments and positive critique are welcome.
The layout of the pages is very simple: contains 10 chapters, all the chapters are contained in separate files. Since the examples are designed to be understandable and simple(to use the least resources) instead of embedded VRML worlds I used a Javascript function to open the examples in small pop-up windows. Since this is done using JavaScript, if you don't use Netscape 2.1 or newer, then you will have problems. Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer should take care about closing the example windows every time, since Explorer doesn't allow to set the focus onto a window by a script: if you don't close the example-window, it may happen that it is updated with the next example in the background: you may notice nothing. Consider to download Netscape :)
For a detailed reference on VRML 2.0 see the VRML/ISO Draft for International Standard (DIS) which is mirrored here.
Table of contents
Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák August 24. 1997