Agenda

1. We need a volunteer to take minutes. First and foremost, will someone volunteer to take minutes at this meeting? The same person or someone else can turn the minutes into a web page later. We hope to post minutes of all meetings on the VRML-UI site at vag.vrml.org.
2. Discussion/Endorsement of Co-Chairs. Sascha Becker and Gregory Seidman have volunteered to be the VRML-UI Working Group's Co-Chairs. For the time being this also includes Sascha acting as Administrivia Czar and Greg acting as Webmaster. Let's raise objections to any of this now or officially endorse them as our Co-Chairs.
3. Discussion of the Charter. The main goal of this meeting is to produce the charter. We expect a draft to be sent to the list by or before March 28 (the day after CHI ends). There will then be a week of discussion on the list. A final document will be ratified on April 4, 1997. Charter specifics:
1. Deliverables. We must agree on what deliverables we plan on producing. The list below is not necessarily complete, but additional suggestions should be described at the same level of abstraction if possible. All further points of order concerning the charter rely on the list of deliverables.
• Theoretical Architecture of Widgets This includes naming conventions of fields and events and the model of the composition of a widget (such as Pauli's tri-stratification or Greg's layer model).
• Taxonomy of Widgets This is a taxonomy of some sort, though it may not be a strict taxonomy, which is a tree, so much as a DAG due to possible multiple inheritance like the discrete/continuous in addition to the type (SFFloat, SFRotation, etc.) of data produced by the widget. It has been suggested that classificiation within this "taxonomy" may be defined by specific syntax of a widget (e.g. a Slider widget always produces a SFFloat value from 0.0 to 1.0 on an eventOut named fraction_changed, so anything that produces such an event from user input is a Slider as well as anything else).
• Core Widgets We are looking for a basic, vanilla set of widget PROTOs which will probably include at least a Slider and a Button. They should probably support pluggable geometry as well. Greg's widgets may be used as a starting point.
• Widget Repository The repository will include our Core Widgets, but we are concerned with the collection, storage, and retrieval of the widgets. In particular, the taxonomy may come into play with searches based on the taxonomic structure.
• Feedback (to VRB and other WGs) on specification limitations. There are widgets we might like to have which are not possible with the current specification. For example, the current specification has no support for tracking a 3D input device in more than two dimensions. We may find limitations in the Java or Living Worlds specifications which preclude the use or creation of certain useful widgets. We will make recommendations of changes to such specifications a deliverable.
2. Problem statement(s). Having decided upon the deliverables, we must compose either a problem statement for each deliverable or a single unified problem statement which covers all of the deliverables. At this meeting we hope to not only decide whether to have a single problem statement or one per deliverable, but also to compose the statement(s).
3. Justification(s). Similarly, we need to justify either the entire Working Group or each deliverable. At this meeting we hope to make this decision and compose the justification(s).
4. Timeline. Our timeline begins with the charter we hope to produce by April 4 and includes the Core Widgets and/or the Repository by SIGGRAPH '97. Each deliverable must have a deadline.