The vision is to provide multiuser, scalable, networked virtual worlds. This is a mouthful, to say the least. Let's pull it apart and put it back together to give you an idea of what might be possible:
This requires several people to appear (or not appear) in the same virtual world, or at least in some specific place within a virtual world. Just as you are an instance of the super class human on the planet Earth, your VRML representation would refer to you as an avatar, with whatever shape, appearance, color, or geometry that you specify. Many instances of avatars in a virtual world imply group behavior, community, interaction, and extended behaviors. For the purpose of this discussion, perhaps the best analogy is to imagine that instead of walking into a "chat-room" on America Online and seeing text from a number of participants, you walk into a VRML chat room and see the person or "thing" you are talking to. And they can see you, or at least a geometric representation of you. You could appear as you are, as a simple model of a human, or you could choose to be a lamp, a vacuum cleaner, or some abstract mathematical object.
Scalability is perhaps the most important feature needed for the acceptance and furthering of VRML. As more and more virtual worlds come into being, they will inevitably get very complex--to the point where even the fastest home PC hooked up to a decent Internet connection will not be able to provide interactive performance. If the user cannot enjoy even minimal interaction with the virtual world and the things in it, they will not use it. Scalability refers to the features and functions that VRML requires in order to enable many users to simultaneously populate virtual worlds, without excessively taxing the performance of their machines or enviromentally polluting the virtual world with excessive baggage (i.e. that virtual dog that follows you around may render nicely on a new Sun Ultra 1 Creator system connected to a T1 link, but totally overloads the average PC using software-only rendering). For VRML to succeed, it must be able to support many users with reasonable interactive response times.
The Internet is where it all begins. People talking to other people. Without networked connections, the only people in your virtual world are you and the people or things you put there. However, with an open-ended connection to the Internet running a VRML protocol that supports multiple entities, the possibilities are endless. Any commercial implementation of VRML will have to support networking at its core.
Using a VRML-capable Web browser,you can set your controls for http://www.7wonders.wrl (a non-existent example). Once your browser makes the connection and begins transferring VRML content, objects begin appearing on your browser window. First you see the Colossus of DARPA, the largest single government-funded statue in the known virtual world.
As you move through this world and get close to the statues, you realize there are several other virtual tourists standing around taking digital snapshots of the Colussus. Seeing a familiar face from a previous virtual life, you tap an elegant gentleman on the shoulder and start up a conversation with him. In real time, the rest of the virtual world dissolves, simplifying the world to just the avatar in front of you, and a live video link from their workstation begins texture mapping their face onto the sphere that represents their head. In perfect synchronization, a full stereo image of his or her voice (and whatever other default audio has associated with this virtual being) begins playing. After several minutes of conversation, you decide to move on.
The video link and audio data recede into the background, the avatar becomes just another virtual pattern map in the crowd, and the current world and all the objects in it come back to the foreground. Off in the distance you see the low-resolution version of the Great Pyramids of Visa. It's the largest collection of virtual financial services vendors in the world, a massive conglomerate of futurist bankers who founded virtual commerce on the Net.
VRML requires a lot of development before all this is at your fingertips, but inevitably, just as the horse and buggy had their day and then became obsolete, so too will plain 2-D image and text surfing disappear.
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