Geology Meets Virtual Reality: VRML Visualization Server Applications

The setup of a VRML visualization server is discussed. The so called VRengine is embedded in a World Wide Web server site accessible by the Internet community. Two geological applications show the advantages of the concept for the visualization of extended data sets. Model specific HTML forms and clickable image maps are provided to build up a visualization request. On the server site a VRML scene is generated by a CGI program using the Visualization Toolkit. To render the scene on the client site VRML plugins are available on most platforms. In addition to the visualization server concept, a short overview about the applied methods of geometric modeling is given.