Mark Pesce, co-creator of Virtual Reality Modeling Language, has resigned from the VRML Consortium and sent an "open letter to the VRML community," warning that powerful corporations are threatening the interests of content producers and users in the push to promote and improve VRML. The letter, emailed Tuesday, came a day before the Consortium's existence was to be officially announced.
"It has become increasingly clear to me that the Consortium might well represent the end of the democratic nature of our community, rather than its full flower," Pesce's missive stated.
Pesce was a founder of the VRML Architecture Group (VAG), a self-appointed closed working group which created, and will be subsumed by, the Consortium, a California nonprofit corporation. The Consortium's aim is to foster the development of an open, platform-independent specification for VRML, making it more accessible to consumers and developers.
In a telephone interview with Wired News, Pesce said he was concerned about the formation of the Consortium's board of directors, which he claims is "packed with big names from big companies," including two companies which had "done everything in their power to hamstring VRML." One of these is Apple, which has its own virtual reality standard, QuickTimeVR, and which Pesce accuses of "doing everything they could to destroy VRML." Pesce would not identify the other company.
Pesce also said he believes that all VAG members should resign and stand for re-election. As it stands, only two members of the eight-member VAG will resign to make way for two members elected at large from the Consortium membership.
Rikk Carey, president and CEO of the VRML Consortium, denied Pesce's accusations, and dismissed his comments about Apple as "hallucination." He stressed that the board of directors was acting only in the interim, until a general election could be held in January. Nevertheless, the board decided last Friday to ask the controversial companies to step down. "The interim board is unimportant," said Carey, "and we don't want to create any more attention than it deserves."
Pesce, meanwhile, has vowed to remain active and visible in the industry. He has spoken informally with the three major VRML users groups, in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and plans to establish a group to represent the interests of individual users, content developers, and small companies.
"If people in the community want to prevent the Consortium from becoming a billionaire boys' club," Pesce said, "it's up to them to be vigilant."
