Back From the Brink - Part 3 At Sony, Chris is working on the brave new world of digital broadcast television, and he speculates that VRML may find its true home here. On the Internet, the universal presence of VRML requires a hardware base that, in Chris' view, is two or three years away. But the new digital set-top boxes for television now being brought into production for the purpose of decoding digital broadcast signals will contain powerful processors and graphics hardware.
Digital television is a certainty, a requirement imposed by the federal government.
So there's no question of its future. But digital television will permit the integration of traditional video with the kind of text display, graphics and interactivity that we already associate with computers. Chris argues that the future of VRML may well be as a piece in a larger new standard. Chris has put some serious thought into the reasons for VRML's disappointing progress thus far. As already mentioned, the VRML specification was formulated with a view toward immersive worlds on the Internet for which there is little present demand.