Last Updated: August 9, 1996

VRML 2.0 Conformance Testing

SIGGRAPH, August 5, 1996


Meeting Summary

During SIGGRAPH '96, NIST hosted a meeting of VRML developers and content providers. At this meeting, we presented NIST's mission, why we were interested in VRML, and a proposed framework for VRML 2.0 Conformance Testing (Postscript version of Mary Brady's slides). The purpose of the meeting was to determine whether the VRML community was interested in NIST's participation, and if so, to what extent we could utilize resources from the community in developing test suites for VRML metafiles, browsers, and authoring tools.

The meeting was well attended by many active supporters of VRML 2.0. The response from this community was overwhelming. They were very much interested in NIST taking a leadership role in conformance testing, and have very specific and immediate concerns. In general, the community is willing to contribute past testing resources, including a public domain parser, a couple of translator tools, and some VRML 1.0 metafiles. They would like to see NIST take these tools, and build upon them to provide the community with a full set of testing resources.

There are three major areas of work: file syntax, browsers, and authoring tools. Below are approaches and the response from those at the meeting.

Metafile Syntax: Provide a mechanism for determining whether a metafile is syntactically correct, including the following constraints:

NIST approach:

Response:

VRML Browsers: Provide a mechanism for determining whether VRML Browsers behave properly:

NIST Approach: Build a set of conformant metafiles. Display these files on both the browser in question and a reference browser; visually compare the results.

Response:

VRML Authoring Tools: Tools must generate conformant worlds.

NIST Approach: This area is very difficult to test, due to the fact that there are no minimum requirements for VRML Authoring Tools.

Response: Don't worry about authoring tools - spend your efforts in metafile syntax and browser testing. At a minimum, the syntax checker can provide a basic test for these developers.


Name Company E-mail
Lynne Rosenthal NIST lsr@nist.gov
Mark Skall NIST skall@nist.gov
Mary Brady NIST mbrady@nist.gov
Jim Doubek Chaco Communications jimd@chaco.com
Glenn Crocker Chaco Communications glenn@chaco.com
Mark Pesce VAG mpesce@vag.vrml.org
Gavin Bell WAZABI/VAG gavin@acm.org
James Waldrop Construct sulam@construct.net
Don Brutzman NPS brutzman@nps.navy.mil
Erik Johnson Axial Systems, Inc erik@axial.com
Bob Lipman NIST lipman@nist.gov
Chris Marrin SGI cmarrin@sgi.com
Rikk Carey WAZABI rikk@best.com
Andrey Wydler SGI andres@engr.sgi.com
Val Watson NASA Ames watson@nas.nasa.gov
Ron Levine Consultant levine@dorianresearch.com
Sandy Ressler NIST sressler@nist.gov
Bill Horn IBM horwwp@watson.ibm.com
Gabriel Taubin IBM taubin@watson.ibm.com
Dick Puk INTELLIGRAPHICS, Inc puk@megatek.com
Steve Carson GSC Associates carson@siggraph.org
Michael P. Netscape MICHAELP@NETSCAPE.com
Jan Hardenbergh Netscape JCH@NETSCAPE.com
Gray Schlichting BAMTA gray@bamta.org
Andrew Hess Axial andy@axial.com
Harry Vittelli Axial harry@axial.com
Mike Pell Axial pell@axial.com
Martin Hess Axial marty@axial.com
Scott Fraize Dimension X SCOTT@DNX.COM
Pam Arya GRCI parya@grci.com
Rachel Duff GRCI rduff@grci.com
Mitra PANDORA MITRA@EARTH.PATH.NET

Contact Information

Mary Brady
Project Leader, VRML 2.0 Testing
(301) 975-4094
NIST North (820), Room 572
Gaithersburg, MD 20899
official email: mbrady@nist.gov

Email any comments regarding this page to mbrady@nist.gov.