VRML Examples

• Unlighted Cone
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  First there was a cone.
• Lighted Cone
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  Let there be light.
• Texturemap
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  Apply the image of the MediaMail mailbox to a scene.
• Three Spheres
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  Starting point for a few demos.
• Hyperlinked Spheres
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  Left sphere is a hyperlink to another HTML document so it controls the web browser. The right sphere is a hyperlink to a VRML document, so it will reload the VRML browser.
• Hyperlinked Spheres with text
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  Same thing as above, but with text annotations.
• Changed focalDistance of Spheres.
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  In effect, this changes the center of rotation for the images in the scene.
• Changed Perspective of Spheres.
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  This is equivalent to switching to a wide-angle lens on a "real" camera.

Fake Lighting

• Lighted Cone
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  Starting Point for these examples
• Showing the location of the light
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  The light source in this model is surrounded by a sphere to show its location. Notice that in spite of the fact that the sphere is surrounding the source, the surface of the cone is still lighted. This is because we are not raytracing. The reflection off of surfaces is computed entirely as a function of their angle with respect to the viewer and the light sources. Consequently there are no shadows.
  Unfortunately, light coming from "nowhere", doesn't look particularly realistic. Nor does a black sphere casting light.
• Making the light source look more realistic
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  By increasing the intensity of the emissiveColor of the sphere, it can be made to appear to glow. The glowing of the sphere is not the true source of illumination for the cone, but it is sufficient to convince anyone viewing the scene that it is.
• A fake floodlight
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  Here is an even more realistic (and common) way of "faking" a light source.

Polygonal Objects

• Three walls
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  Starting point for these examples.
• A Frame
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  A frame composed of lines. This change was effected by simply changing from an IndexedFaceSet to an IndexedLineSet to describe the object.
• Wall colors applied per face
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  This indexing also makes it clearer which walls are which.
• Wall colors indexed per vertex
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  This indexing also makes it clearer which walls are which.
• Wall colors indexed per vertex.
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  By indexing the colors, we can specify precisesly which color is bound to which vertex.
• Wall colors indexed per face
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  You can also index by face.
• Apply a texturemap to the walls.
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  Here, the texturemap is applied to the entire object.
• Apply a transformed texturemap to the walls.
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  Here, the texturemap has been reduced in size by 50% and rotated by 30 degrees.
• Index the texture coords
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  By doing this, you can control the application of the textures so each wall gets its own image. By default, the mapping of the image will attempt to cover the entire object.
• Warped Texture Map
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  This is the same as above, but the texture is being "pinched" and "stretched" on some of the walls by selecting object coordinates in the middle (less than 1.0) or outside of the image (greater than 1.0). You can realize more dramatic effects by using more complex objects.
• Text can be texturemapped as well.
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  Use the dolly to zoom out on the globe and you can see how a dimple texture can add depth to the object. The textures in this case are only 1k (very low cost in terms of network bandwidth). The same texture is being reused about 50 times to cover the entire sphere, but it only has to be downloaded once. This is a low cost method to improve image/scene quality.
• The grand masters of texturemapping. Paragraph Inc. has make very extensive and dramatic use of texture maps to improve the appearance of their architectural models.