"Bottom, Thou Art Translated": The Making of VRML Dream

n the late summer of 1997, we sat in a pub in Toronto, Canada, and began planning an ambitious project: to create a new entertainment medium. The idea was to mount a live performance of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and " broadcast " it over the Internet. The sets, props, and all the characters were to be modeled using the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) 2.0. A group of actors would provide the voices, and puppeteers would control the characters. Both the voices and the motion data would be digitized, compressed, and sent out over the Internet in real time. Moreover, people would be able to access this broadcast with a 28.8-Kbps modem connection and a 150-MHz Pentium computer. Less than six months later, VRML Dream made Internet history. 1 VRML Dream was the first live, streaming, VRML entertainment project with a running time of more than two or three minutes, and it proved that streaming both motion and voice data over standard Internet connections was possible. This article looks at the development of the project, its models and technology, and the main issues that influenced the final design. It also examines the technology needed to create live, streaming, real-time 3D animation for the Internet as well as some of the challenges that lie ahead. The VRML Dream Project grew out of our interest in both new media and VRML. New media and the Information Superhighway have been the " visions for the future " that will, at least according to the pundits, radically change the way people learn, work, and entertain themselves. However, most of the technologies being touted for this revolution—streaming video and audio, push technology, and other network-based technolo-gies—involve the delivery of traditional media forms through digital communication devices. In contrast, VRML has been a new media standard in search of an application. A number of companies and individuals have searched for the " killer app " for the standard. Some of the most interesting applications are based in narrative content. A notable narrative project was IrishSpace (http://pluto.njcc.com/~paulsam/ irish/Welcome.html), the story of the survivors of a meteor disaster and plague. The running time for this production was more than one hour. Actors provided the voices for the characters, and VRML was used to create the 3D models and animation. However, making the production available over the Internet has not been practical. The sound files for individual …