THIRD DIMENSION NEW INTERNET FRONTIER : INDUSTRY STANDARD BOOSTS DESIGN, MARKETING.

Byline: John Markoff The New York Times

As new business uses for the Internet erupt, the lusterless, two-dimensional computer desktop display is rapidly giving way to a richer, three-dimensional representation that can be simultaneously viewed by dozens or even hundreds of computer users. Electronic shopping malls, real estate tours, businesses, political groups and even professional sports teams are rushing to virtual reality.

Science fiction novels like Vernor Vinge's ``True Names,'' William Gibson's ``Neuromancer'' and Neal Stephenson's ``Snow Crash'' introduced the original vision of a shared computerized world, called ``cyberspace'' by Gibson and the ``metaverse'' by Stephenson. Beginning in the 1980s, that vision captured the imagination of a generation of computer network designers.

In the 1990s, it has touched off a technology race between industry leaders like Apple Computer, Microsoft, Netscape Communications and IBM and dozens of small design firms and software companies intent on profiting from cyberspace by building realistic three-dimensional Internet worlds.

``We believe that 3-D graphics will soon be pervasive through all of our applications,'' said Shawn Hopwood, a manager in Apple's Interactive Media Division.

The shift is happening most quickly in recreational settings like electronic chat forums and computer games played on networks. As more raw computer power is made available to standard desktop PCs, however, the three-dimensional capabilities that have long been accessible to engineers and industrial designers are quickly becoming standard consumer features.

In San Francisco's growing Multimedia Gulch and at Silicon Valley start-up companies, designers are pushing new three-dimensional technologies that will work with standard World Wide Web browsers, designed to allow users to walk through synthetic environments, or even view real panoramas.

Prototypes include self-guided tours of great museums and a virtual walk on the Great Wall of China, which the user navigates with a Web browser. Both Microsoft and Netscape recently have acquired technology that makes three-dimensional interfaces a standard part of the browser.

What has led to the rush to three dimensions is widespread computer industry agreement on a technology known as the Virtual Reality Modeling Language, or VRML, as an Internet standard. That language has become a foundation for game companies and businesses to build on.

VRML was the brainchild of Tony Parisi and Gavin Bell, two Silicon Graphics engineers, and Mark Pesce, a software engineer who had been consulting with Apple and who was inspired by the work of Stephenson and Gibson.

While there has been other software permitting three-dimensional representations on computer screens, VRML established for the first time a widely shared standard, accessible to any computer or operating system.

Pesce saw the two-dimensional World Wide Web for the first time in 1993. ``I realized how easy it was to get lost,'' he said. ``We don't have human skills for organizing information easily when it's not spatially organized.''

But VRML-based 3-D graphics require far more computer processing power than was available on inexpensive desktop personal computers. Now, both the increasing speed of off-the-shelf microprocessors from Intel and Motorola and the emergence of inexpensive graphics accelerators from Silicon Valley chip design firms like Chromatic Research Inc., Rendition Inc. and Nvidia have made the technology more accessible.

Next year, a version of the Intel Pentium chip will add graphics capabilities known as MMX, which are expected to become part of the company's standard chip design.

Because VRML is an industry standard, no single company has been able to control its direction. Like many new Internet-related industry standards, however, it has led to a burst of start-up activity. Small companies like Onlive Technologies and Realspace Inc., in Cupertino, as well as Black Sun Interactive, a German company, and Animatek Inc., a Russian company - both with offices in San Francisco - have quickly developed technologies to profit from the new standard.

Now dozens of software companies are designing new tools to create more realistic VRML worlds and equally compelling representations of people, called avatars.

A wave of multiplayer game worlds with names like Doom, Duke Nukem and Air Warrior have become the Internet's latest rage. On the horizon are elaborate virtual worlds that will permit PC users to shop, explore, conduct business and chat with friends in photo-realistic three-dimensional settings.

But the dash to 3-D has rekindled the debate over whether consumers want to be entertained passively or whether they will be drawn to the new interactive media that permit them to participate.

``People want to be active,'' said Sherry Turkle, a social scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who wrote ``Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet.'' ``Interactive media is becoming less esoteric and more visually appealing.''