Lover of surreal shaping future of virtual reality   By JAMES McWILLIAMS Times Technology Writer   A humor-cult minister in Huntsville is helping decide the future of cyberspace. Computer-simulation expert and online jokester Bob Crispen - known in the hsv.general Internet forum as the Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen, is a member of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) Review Board. As one of eight members of that international body, Crispen helps create standards for building simulated 3-D worlds online. Crispen got his ministerial credentials by paying $20 to The Church of the SubGenius - a satirical, pseudoreligious organization. Crispen said he added the redundant, second "Bob" to his name because "it makes people go 'Huh?' " "It's an exercise in surreality," Crispen laughed. The VRML board's job is to help people experience not only the surreal, but also other forms of virtual reality through their personal computers. Crispen's credentials for that work come from years of working as a software analyst in Boeing's Phantom Works simulation area. VRML (pronounced "vermal" to rhyme with "thermal") is designed to let anyone on the Internet create and interact with electronic 3-D worlds that can either mirror reality or personal fantasies.

Huntsville computer enthusiast Bob Crispen hovers in a virtual reality world in the center illustration between other computer-generated images. The virtual spaceworld at top is by artist Paul Hoffman. In the bottom illustration, by an unknown artist, is a scene in Norway. All were created in the Virtual Reality Modeling Language.

SportsLine, a company partly owned by CBS Inc., plans to use VRML to recreate the winning plays of professional sports games some time in the near future, said Dani'el Smith, SportsLine's vice president of multimedia applications.

"You'll be able to see the plays from different angles ... fully articulated," said Smith.

SportsLine, at http://www.sportsline.com, is developing proprietary software to create electronic models of the players, based on video images from games, Smith said. SportsLine has also had preliminary discussions with sports leagues about putting sensors on players' uniforms that would let SportsLine track player movements online.

Smith expects VRML to become popular, although he said any consumers may need more powerful computers to experience the full benefit of viewing 3-D animation online.

VRML could be a major benefit to industry and academia, Crispen said. It lets architects, engineers and product designers show off their ideas as realistic images, and lets those people collaborate online with peers around the world.

Financial analysts can create more-detailed graphs using VRML, with data plotted along three axes, rather than the standard two. The richer graphs can help analysts better tell how variables affect each other.

VRML lets science teachers take students on tours through the inside of a molecule, a human body, or a distant galaxy.

It is also a tool for creating entertainment. The computer language lets people create online games and online forums where participants create animated characters to represent themselves.

The most popular Internet-browser software packages from the competing Microsoft Corp. and Netscape Communications support VRML standards, said Crispen. The VRML board is working to expand standards, to allow future software to create even better simulations, without software compatibility problems.

The VRML standard is guided by the VRML Consortium, a worldwide mailing list of people interested in virtual reality. Anyone can join and make technical suggestions by visiting the consortium's World Wide Web site at http://www.vrml.org.

However. the only people who vote on adopting specific VRML standards are representatives from 29 technology companies, government organizations and other eminent institutions. Companies with voting representatives in the consortium include Microsoft, Intel. Apple, Sun Microsystems and Sony.

Twenty-four other institutions including Brown University and the San Diego Supercomputer Center, are nonvoting advisers to the consortium.

Crispen's review board weeds through suggestions to find and recommend the ones that work best technically, A separate board of directors examines whether the technically viable recommendations are workable for businesses.

Then the directors approve or veto the revew board's recommendations, and the Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO) makes those recommendations into global standards for the Internet.

(The ISO is a group with representatives from most governments and from private U.S. and British groups that set technical standards.)

Crispen Joined the VRML mailing list 1995 and made contributions to the current VRML 97 standard before joining the review board in January.

One of Crispen's contributions to VRML 97 got rid of an inconsistency in the way Internet-browsing programs displayed animation when a person first entered a virtual world. Some programs immediately animated certain objects as soon as a person saw them, while other programs didn't, Crispen said. So, he made sure VRML 97 consistently timed the animation to fit the intentions of its creator.

The next version of VRML will probably be approved by the ISO in late 2000 or early 2001, said Crispen. That version will enable VRML to work better with information from databases, allowing virtual worlds to adapt to trends.

That capability can allow virtual worlds to more easily represent stock market variables moment to moment, or can allow 3-D video games to better track where players leave objects in virtual worlds.

As simulation technology improves, the potential uses grow constantly, as do the number of opinions on how the technology should develop. Getting computer experts to agree on future sta,, dards for VRML is as tough a "herding cats," said Crispen. Yet the VRML Consortium is ultimately a "technocracy" in which the best technologies tend to rise to the top, without partisan wrangling or corporate bullying, Crispen said. In fact, the consortium works so efficiently that the ISO has considered using the consortium's open-deliberation process as a role model for other worldwide standardization efforts, Crispen said.

Standardization has been an important key to the Internet's success. If computers didn't have some common. basic ways of in interacting, the entire network would be a briar patch of incompatibility, Crispen said.

"If I create a VRML world and paint a wall red, I don't want someone's software to make it, green, or if I paint a square, I don't want it to look round." Crispen said.

But, ironically, a major part of standardizing the Internet is making sure it isn't so standardized that it becomes a strait jacket for technology developers. "You don't want to stifle innovation," Crispen said.

For now, VRML remains focused on efficiently transmitting interactive, geometric data, Crispen said. Future technicians will have to decide how best to present and use that data with stereographic goggles, touch-sensing gloves, or other technologies.