A Global Routing Mechanism for Modular VRML-Worlds

With the increasing complexity of virtual worlds VRML97 reveals its lack of native support for logical modularization of these worlds. Though the inherent mechanisms as PROTO-typing and Inlining allow us to partition our worlds into several files, the restriction to file-limited namespaces makes an event-routing for complex interactions between different modules a rather difficult task. In this paper we present an easy-to-use method for event-based communication across modular VRML scenes. Based on VRML's event model, this solution goes conform with the VRML97 standard ISO/IEC 14772-1:1997. In order to show its ability to support the implementation of highly interactive and complex VRML-worlds we demonstrate its application in a current project from the fields of virtual heritage.