Internetworked graphics and the Web

Although the networking and computer graphics fields are considered to be distinct disciplines, they must begin to converge in order to support collaborative exploration and information visualization on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Telecommunication breakthroughs remove bottlenecks and provide new opportunities for interactive 3D graphics across globally interconnected, dissimilar networks. Multicast backbone tools, developed in the networking arena, provide desktop videoconferencing tools for sharing information visualization and virtual reality explorations. The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), developed in the computer graphics arena, supports the 3D display and fly-through of networked computing resources on the Internet. The computer graphics community considers VRML to be an interactive tool for exploring content on the Web. The telecommunications community calls it an application on the networking infrastructure. The authors define the concept of internetworked graphics to describe the future merger and dependencies of computer graphics applications and the telecommunications networking infrastructure