Environment mapping is a technique used to simulate surface reflection. The basic principle is that if you were to look at a reflective object in a room, you would see the walls, the floor, and other objects in the room reflected off of the object. When building your Vizard scene you might want to employ environment mapping to produce added realism.
To use environment mapping in Vizard, you simply have to add the appropriate texture map, apply the texture to a node 3D object, and then add the viz.ENVIRONMENT_MAP flag to <node3d>.appearance as in the following example:
Texture appearance and filtering
Appearance & texturing command table
Tutorial: Environmental mapping