The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) allows the creation of 3D "worlds", navigable by you through the use of an "avatar" (a virtual representation of your body). It is a markup language, much like the HTML used to create this page, and it exists in the public domain. More importantly, the browser plugins, the software needed to view VRML worlds, are also in the public domain, and therefore free. The combination of free browsers and plugins, and their cross-platform functionality, make VRML an ideal community visualisation tool. This eliminates the need for buying prohibitively expensive products like AutoCAD for the sole sake of rendering a scene in 3 dimensions.

Combined with a community design decision support system, such as Cameron Churchill's SustDes, VRML allows for a community prototyping tool that would allow stakeholders in a development proposal to quickly view and review different design options. To that end, the next page in this section describes a program written to convert the output of SustDes into VRML.

Before we get to that, though, you'll need a VRML plug-in to view these worlds. If you can see a little house on a green field on the right, and can manipulate that house with your mouse, then you have a VRML plugin. While most browsers come with one installed, we suggest installing the latest of one of the following two, with which we've had considerable success:

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