Prior to joining Oracle, I spent 11 years at IBM, in a variety of computer graphics development jobs, among them establishing and running the Visualization Laboratory at the IBM Almaden Research Center for 5 years. Although Siggraph '96 marked the completion of the VRML 2.0 standard, there is still a sense among typical Internet users that VRML 2.0 is not ready for prime time. Some people cite bandwidth concerns and immature browsers, but these are not the central problems with VRML achieving market success. Another common issue that is raised is that the content is not compelling enough. Although this is certainly a valuable potential market, VRML has the potential to take the Internet to the next level.
Applications are the key to VRML becoming a ubiquitous technology.
This means looking deeply at the tasks that people need to accomplish in our society and finding the common strands where distributed 3D graphics facilitate the process. It means advancing standards that enable interactions in 3D spaces to manipulate information in the real world, so that a virtual transaction corresponds to a real transaction. Although VRML 2.0 provides the initial hooks for such possibilities, doing it right will require additional architecture and standards. I will ensure that the appropriate working groups are addressing these issues and that the Board is helping provide leadership where VRML application development extends beyond the scope of the working groups. Our mission in making VRML successful is to clearly demonstrate to people that VRML enables them to more effectively accomplish useful tasks.