FunWorlds – Functional Programming and Virtual Worlds. http www.cs.ukc.ac.ukpeoplestaffcr3.pdf

FunWorlds: Functional Programming and Virtual Worlds (draft of September 17, 2001) Claus Reinke Computing Laboratory, University of Kent c.reinke@ukc.ac.uk – http://www.cs.ukc.ac.uk/people/staff/cr3/ Abstract. The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) is a stan- dard format for describing interactive 3d content, especially on the world- wide web. It combines declarative specifications of static scenes with imperative manipulations of scene graphs to realise dynamic scenes. Functional reactive animation (Fran) is a domain-specific modeling lan- guage for graphical animations and multimedia. Fran has convincingly demonstrated the value of an entirely declarative approach to modeling built around the concepts of time-varying behaviours interacting with discrete events, embedded in a functional host language enriched with domain-specific primitives (graphics in the case of Fran). One of Fran’s ancestors, named ActiveVRML, was put forward as a proposal for VRML 2.0 by Microsoft graphics groups. It failed to gain acceptance for a va- riety of reasons, but mostly because its concepts remained alien to the community driving the VRML standardisation process. We set out to re-examine the design space for interactive 3d content, tak- ing the current standard VRML’97 and Fran as yardsticks. The present paper reports on our experience in mapping Fran concepts into VRML’97. We prototype our suggestions as an embedded compiler in Haskell, gen- erating standard VRML’97+ECMAScript code from concise declarative descriptions. The results are promising in two directions: first, they give the functional programming community access to a rich output medium for animated, interactive 3d content, employing standard technology, but avoiding low-level specifications. Second, the mapping will help to com- pare Fran, which developed out of ActiveVRML, with VRML’97, which developed out of a competing proposal for VRML 2.0, hopefully helping the VRML community to re-assess the values of Fran’s