Microsoft’s Caligari acquisition triggers flashback

When I heard the news that Microsoft had acquired Caligari Software, makers of the trueSpace 3D modeling application, I thought for a moment that I had slipped through some rift in space/time. It was once again 1996, and I was fresh off a stint with IBM’s Personal Software Marketing division. My new wife was pregnant with our first child and we were working together on a side project involving VRML and Biochemistry.

The project consisted of developing 3D VRML models of various building-block molecules. For those of you unfamiliar with the acronym, VRML stands for Virtual Reality Modeling Language, a kind of 3D file format for rendering objects or landscapes over the web. In practice, you’d use a browser plug-in to parse the file and render the “world” in an interactive (i.e. you could navigate within the 3D space) window inside a web page. VRML even had its own funky URL syntax that would trigger Internet Explorer or (at the time) Netscape Navigator to load the plug-in.

It was new. It was cool. And it was entirely impractical.

For starters, VRML files tended to be fat, much fatter than your typical HTML document. In fact, the files were *so* large that the plug-in makers all adopted a compression scheme involving gzip in and effort to lower the network overhead. However, even with compression (and other bandwidth-saving tweaks, like loading only portions of the VRML object based on view “distance” and the level of detail required), VRML still never caught on outside of a few “gee whiz” 3D demos. We ended-up shelving the project after we discovered another company had already released a competing library using a more powerful (it was designed specifically to render molecular models and had features that that VRML couldn’t touch), proprietary — yet freely downloadable — plug-in.

I bring all this up because, at time of the aforementioned project, my tool of choice for VRML modeling was trueSpace2 (and its “freebie,” VRML-only sibling called “Fountain” — trueSpace2 didn’t support VRML authoring directly). Many long nights were spent wrestling with Caligari’s oddball UI decisions (they basically threw much of the Microsoft application design guide out the window and rolled their own). It was an interesting time in my life, and my involvement with VRML ultimately led me to write a book about the technology: “Instant VRML Worlds” (look it up).

Returning to the present for the moment, it’s my understanding that Microsoft has acquired Caligari to help with its Virtual Earth project. I’m guessing they want to tap Caligari’s expertise in LOD (Level of Detail) management and other VRML-like technologies that will be critical to the success of the their upcoming 3D version of Virtual Earth.

Congratulations to Caligari for getting picked-up by the Redmond behemoth. It’s always nice to see an “old friend” make it big …