As part of my
requirements for a diploma in digital media, I did my first internship
at Virtual Artists Pty. Ltd. in Australia. I worked there for half a year to get
practical experience and an idea of how an Australian company works. And
this was one of the best experiences in my life!
Virtual Artists is located right in the
city of Adelaide. They are doing everything that has to do with the internet
and new technology in general. Their main clients are the South Australian
Government and artists from all over Australia.
The company was founded in 1993 by Dave
Sag and Jesse Reynolds.
Their main field of work is to present
various festivals on the net, but they do web design, consultancy, video
capturing, real audio streaming and lots more.
 Jesse
Reynolds is 25 years old and was studying drama, computer science and philosophy.
He didn't finish his course, because he wanted to start doing his own business,
Virtual Artists.
Dave Sag is 31 years old, studied in Queensland
as well as in Adelaide, but didn't finish his degree either,
because the lectures were "irrelevant" to him.
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Virtual Artists' staff includes Jenni Robertson,
working two days a week, doing administration and finance and Ben Moretti,
doing project managment.
Virtual Artists use Apple Computer for
their daily work, and the web-pages are served by a sun sparc 2 and an
apple server. They've got an internet connection of 10 m/bits to their service
provider.
I was working on a pentium 75 running
Windows NT 4.0. My job was to administer this machine as well as trying
all the new stuff that's out there on the net. I also learned a lot about
unix, while I was working with the sun. I learned a lot about the network,
about DNS-servers and virtual domains and the ins and outs of system administration.
I set up a ftp-server, a web-server, and
my own virtual domain, floyd.va.com.au.
 I've
also done a complete new web-page for Port
Youth Theater Workshop.
I've done the whole process of doing a
web-page, talking with the client about here ideas as well as coding and
publishing the page on the server.
My main task was to learn VRML and integrate
this new technology into a new working-field of the company.
I started with VRML1.0, but VRML2.0 came out soon after, so I began concentrating on this. VRML2.0 stands for Virtual
Reality Modelling Language, and the new version is known as moving worlds,
because in comparison to version 1.0, you can now add behaviour to objects.
Because the whole technology is so
new, there is only beta software available, and no browser supports
every node of the specification yet. (A node is the equivalent to an HTML
tag).
I did my first VRML2.0 worlds with a text
editor by measuring the furniture in our office. I then made a 3d plan
and converted it into a VRML2.0 file with a normal editor. Using
Javascript, I added different behaviour and animations to the objects.
The result is a VRML2.0 model of Virtual
Artists' office, so people can have a look at it without
ever having been in Australia.
I think this new technology gives the
net a whole new dimension, the dimension that we are used to, the 3rd one.
It will help people to visualise things. A picture is worth 1000 words, but a model
is worth a million.
I really enjoyed myself this half a year
at Virtual Artists, I learned a lot, and had a wonderful time.
I love being a Virtual Artist.
Florian Mueller
March 1997
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