A Virtual Tour of the Engineering School and Technical Report on VRML 2.0

VRML is an emerging technology for developing interactive three-dimensional virtual worlds on the Internet. The objective of this thesis project was to create a virtual tour of the School of Engineering and Applied Science using VRML, along with an informative report on the current specification of VRML. The purpose of the tour is three-fold: to demonstrate the capabilities and usefulness of VRML, to organize SEAS information on the web, and to provide a basis for a University-wide virtual tour. The tour demonstrates the features of the VRML language that are described in a supplementary report on VRML included in this project. The tour provides an organization to the web pages of the Engineering School by associating departmental pages with the locations of the buildings that house those departments. Using the tour, a user may find the web page of any engineering department by walking to the building that houses that department. Clicking on a link attached to the building will take the user to the corresponding web page. This method of finding information is more intuitive than memorizing web addresses. The informative report on VRML provides the reader with an overview of the structure of the language as well as a description of the types of features that VRML provides for building virtual worlds. VRML is a young language and is still in a period of development and fairly rapid change. As time progresses, new features will be added to the language. Hopefully others will continue work on the virtual tour in the future by adding other areas of the University. Through continued work the virtual tour will grow and improve as technology advances and VRML evolves.

Thesis originally deposited on 2011-12-28 in version 1.28 of Libra. This thesis was migrated to Libra2 on 2016-11-30 15:16:18.