12 ms·

VRML

150 points by vmoore 5y ago

PaulHoule 5y ago
So much fun back in the day.
- vmoore 5y ago
  Even more fun: https://threejs.org/ https://threejs.org/
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    I wrote my own 3D library in JS before that library came out. I am so looking forward to doing projects with WebGL.
- rasz 5y ago
  It wasnt fun, it was borderline scam, Web3 of its time.
  - snorkel 5y ago
    Metaverse is what VRML tech was aspiring to back then, but standard dial-up internet, early web browsers, and PCs could not deliver immersive realtime 3D. It was obviously decades ahead of its time. I recall needing to install web browser plugin (I tried a few), then the VRML scene file takes a while to download (dial-up) and then draws an ugly 3D scene in the browser. Then the mouse navigation was horrible. No collision detection of course so you could easily fly through the floor, end up upside down, walk through objects, etc. No sound. No chat. No multi-user. At least it had level of detail optimization so processing wasn't on distant details. Then you'd click on a link in the scene and it would either load a different 3D scene, or jump you back out to a plain old 2D web page in the web browser. And of course you'd be looking at this on a plain old 17-inch CRT screen (no VR headset). I see my Oculus collecting dust and I feel VR tech has improved by a lot, but still, meh.
    - PaulHoule 5y ago
      I used VRML for my thesis work where I was visualizing an energy surface in a 6 dimensional space and understanding the bifurcations where it would get holes, start to wrap around the space, break into separate pieces, etc. I had all sorts of complaints around what VRML couldn’t do at that time, particularly how you’d inevitably get your back turned to what you were supposed to look at, have a hard time turning around, and the people developing the world don’t care. Looking back with insight from ‘the metaverse’ I see the problem as a lack of storytelling or the facilities for storytelling. The idea that you’re going to bum around in some virtual world and indulge your narcissism in parallel to how you indulge your narcissism in the real world still appeals to those who want to subject us to ‘experiences’ even if it doesn’t for end users. I started studying theme park design a few months back because I was interested in seducing people (which you could win at 100% of the time if you had 100% control of the environment.) The metaverse fad came up and it gave me a good mental model of what’s missing in the metaverse…. Storytelling! Many people in 2022 are inclined to accept you can have fiction without storytelling because we’re so used to fiction that is driven by characters and setting (say Star Wars or My Little Pony Friendship is Magic). Somebody even pointed out to be that those Victorian novels I couldn’t stand in high school were part of this trend. Some point people will realize that ‘the line is going up’ (NFTs) isn’t a good enough story but until VR designers adopt storytelling ideas from theme parks people will be snoozing.
      - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
        This is good insight. Storytelling over function.
      - kmeisthax 5y ago
        "storytelling ideas from theme parks" Videogames call this "environmental storytelling" and it's a really solid way of constructing a narrative in such spaces. The reason why the current or prior generations of "metaverse" technologies don't do this is because they're not trying to be a narrative work. They're trying to be "HTTP for 3D worlds" - in other words, hoping someone else will come in and build the narrative on top of their platform so they can charge the creators a fee to publish their own work.
  - pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
    Did people use to lose all their savings on VRML?
ajconway 5y ago
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown 20 years later we're finally somewhat there with VR Chat and Horizon.
astlouis44 5y ago
WebAssembly, WebGPU, and WebXR are the new VRML and will pave the way for an open, platform-agnostic metaverse where sites becomes worlds, hyperlinks becomes portals, profile pictures become avatars, and profiles become personal homes or spaces others can visit. Interestingly, Meta's CTO just let slip yesterday about a web version of Horizon: https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/14/23025899/meta-horizon-worlds-web-version-metaverse-platform https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/14/23025899/meta-horizon-wor...
- jdrc 5y ago
  i honestly want to know what people are smoking . We've had these things for 30 years, with SL and minecraft and VRchat etc. it's a small niche
  - chriswarbo 5y ago
    There was some pressure to get SecondLife open-sourced and federated, but IIRC it didn't really get anywhere. On the other hand, projects like Croquet/Qwak/Cobalt have been open-source for over a decade; are federated/P2P; already have "hyperlink portals" like parent commented; support existing standards like XMPP, VNC, etc.; have been ported to Javascript; etc. And yet, they seem effectively dead :(
    - jdrc 5y ago
      > to get SecondLife open-sourced and federated That's opensimulator
    - mintplant 5y ago
      The SL client ("viewer") has been open source for a very long time, and there used to be a thriving ecosystem of third-party forks. Nowadays Firestorm [0] is the one everyone uses. The server software remains closed source. OpenSim [1], a community-driven reimplementation with federation support, has been around for a while but as you say hasn't really gone anywhere since the original wave of metaverse hype died down. [0] https://www.firestormviewer.org https://www.firestormviewer.org [1] http://opensimulator.org http://opensimulator.org
srvmshr 5y ago
The way I learnt about VRML was FAS website. As a young teenager, I used to obsess over fighter planes. Then I stumbled upon the weapons & equipment pages on Federation of American Scientists (FAS) website. See [1] as an example. They had WRL files (a VRML format) for most planes in their inventory. 15 years ago that was cool. (1) https://nuke.fas.org/guide/russia/airdef/mig-23.htm https://nuke.fas.org/guide/russia/airdef/mig-23.htm
dang 5y ago
Surprisingly little previous discussion: VRML was a standard in 1995 but now everyone's excited about The Metaverse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29237519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29237519 - Nov 2021 (4 comments) Ask HN: Is VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) Relevant to Metaverse? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29111474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29111474 - Nov 2021 (2 comments) VRML – Virtual Reality Markup Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29046541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29046541 - Oct 2021 (3 comments) VRML (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28374558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28374558 - Aug 2021 (1 comment) A free Java VRML Viewer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24805346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24805346 - Oct 2020 (1 comment)
- madrox 5y ago
  One of those is my submission. I posted it in response to all the buzz over figuring out VR markup. It seems to me no one wants to actually use existing stuff. People are just having fun reinventing it.
  - mathgladiator 5y ago
    During my limited time at FRL (i.e. Meta), I tried to be a proponent of X3D (successor of VRML), and the push back I got was tremendous. You're right that people want to reinvent it.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      Well, thanks for fighting for standards adoption, even if it didn't work out. It's always good to have interoperability represented on the inside.
    - em-bee 5y ago
      how did that pushback look like? to old? failed technology? i saw a lot of excitement around VRML at the university in the late 90s. the problem was that average computers just didn't have the capacity for 3d rendering back then. at the university we had high end SGI workstations, and of course these were used for impressive demonstrations of what VRML could do. but i guess because noone outside had computers capable enough it didn't catch on. the current generation is not aware of what we did back then and may not realize that lack of performance was the primary problem we were facing.
oh_sigh 5y ago
I became known as the tech wiz of my school in 1998(7th grade) when I made a little 3d forest scene using VRML for a class project instead of a diorama. It was fun, but even then I had to question what the heck this could possibly be used for.
sbayeta 5y ago
> It has been superseded by X3D.
dec0dedab0de 5y ago
I remember seeing vrml sites in 96 or 97 and thinking I was so far behind because I couldn't figure out how to do it.
xtracto 5y ago
I did a project with VRML around 1999. It was an application for "real time" monitoring of emergency ships, helicopters and other vehicles when they were dispatched to oil platforms in distress within the Gulf of Mexico. It was a nice toy but rely useless at that time,and a resource hog for computers of that moment. Still a fun project.
henriquez 5y ago
Frank Zappa had a VRML website of his recording studio called The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen. My computer in the mid-90s was barely capable of rendering it but I remember being in awe of how cool it was.
- spidaman 5y ago
  This gets an upvote merely for citing Frank Zappa in any way
nvader 5y ago
FTA, under "Criticism": > Every time VRML practitioners approach the problem of how to represent space on the screen, they have no focused reason to make any particular trade-off of detail versus rendering speed, or making objects versus making spaces, because VRML isn't for anything except itself. Many times, having a particular, near-term need to solve brings a project's virtues into sharp focus, and gives it enough clarity to live on its own. > > Clay Shirky
- tootie 5y ago
  Replace "VRML" with everything being done on the web3 space.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  I once asked Mark Pesche: What about time? What about scripting? "We'll add those later." But you need both from the start. "VR" is not a 3D still life painting. One of the most common annoying question lots of people asked Mark at the time was "How does VRML relate to XML?" to which the annoying answer was "it doesn't". All that relentless XML badgering from XML drones eventually drove Mark to the point of publishing a vitriolic anti-XML diatribe in high dudgeon, based on the premise that Microsoft was going in whole hog on XML, therefore XML was Evil, because Microsoft is Evil, so you shouldn't use XML, because Microsoft ruined XML, and you should use VRML, because VRML doesn't use XML, which is the great thing about VRML. Might as well combine the anti-Microsoft fervor with the anti-XML backlash of the times to promote VRML. XML certainly is evil, but not because of Microsoft supporting it! This annoying misconception about VRML using XML may be why they eventually retronymed VRML from "Virtual Reality Markup Language" to "Virtual Reality Modeling Language" at one point. (YAML went through the same "oops" realization). He also wrote another epic diatribe dramatically comparing himself and the VRML inner cabal to the true elder gods of old mythology, who after creating the universe and starting it going, were finally going to step aside and let the new kingdom of mankind and their lesser imaginary gods take over their own fate and bla bla bla... I haven't been able to dig up any archives of whatever mailing list I read that stuff on, but if anybody has some of the old school vrml mailing list archives sitting around, I'd love to have a link or a copy -- it was terrific entertainment!
Yhdz 5y ago
In 2000 I did an internship at a Dutch media company and created a 3D VRML video site. The interesting thing for me at the time was that the server composed the final VRML by combining a template with database results, similar to PHP. I have no idea how common this was, but I was pretty proud of it at the time:) Unfortunately VRML plug-ins where not that great, even worse when I needed them to be able to play real video, so it was never deployed.
- jandrese 5y ago
  Oh yeah, I remember the VRML plugins with their horrendous navigation solutions. POTS Modems were also insufficient to reasonably stream scenes of any complexity. It was a technology about 10 years ahead of its time. I always considered the successor to be SecondLife. I guess the Metaverse is trying to be the successor to SecondLife, but I think they're trying to solve the wrong problems with it and are not likely to be successful.
  - Yhdz 4y ago
    One thing I learned in that internship is that 2D is way more useful for navigating most information than 3D environments. Only when the information itself is 3D it becomes more valuable, and even then a projection to 2D might give a better overview. Games have done Metaverse like 3D multiplayer environments for years now, but always combined with gameplay or construction elements. I don’t really see the point of going to a 3D chat environment if there are no work/entertainment benefits in them that are clearly superior in 3D.
- ilaksh 5y ago
  You could do the same thing today with A-Frame VR.
mellosouls 5y ago
Related - and to add to the comments claiming the superceding standard - OpenXR: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenXR https://wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenXR
- astlouis44 5y ago
  No actually it’s WebGPU, WebAssembly, and WebXR
- singularity2001 4y ago
  Trying to find any live examples or sample code I ended up with this: https://www.khronos.org/openxr/ https://www.khronos.org/openxr/ => static const XrDebugUtilsMessageTypeFlagsEXT XR_DEBUG_UTILS_MESSAGE_TYPE_CONFORMANCE_BIT_EXT = 0x00000008; This is conceptually on the other end of VRML and it's not clear if 3D rendering in the browser is even one of its goals
Aspos 5y ago
I vividly remember watching Mir space station deorbiting in VRML in real-time in 2001. It seemed normal back then, but looking back it is unbelievable how smooth the whole experience was given the state of the internet in 2001. Edit: Wow, the site still exists! http://www.parallelgraphics.com/vrml/mir2/ http://www.parallelgraphics.com/vrml/mir2/
- ajconway 5y ago
  Looks wonderful in 2022: "Each scene is 100KB in size. It may take up to a minute for the scene to load, so please be patient."
  - dylan604 5y ago
    "Sorry, this platform is not supported by Cortona VRML browser which is needed to display VRML scenes. " No recommendations on what is supported though. I'm guessing best viewed in IE at 800x600
bawolff 5y ago
When i was young, one of the only "real" computer books my local public library had was on vrml. I still remember it quite fondly.
nfrankel 5y ago
Funny to see this here. More than twenty years ago, I did my Master thesis in Architecture using VRML to display a building I had designed and the surrounding district. I especially loved the Level-Of-Detail object that allows to design different objects depending on the distance of the object with the view point. I still have the files somewhere, but last time I checked, I found no software to read them.
jbgreer 5y ago
I still have my autographed copy of Mark Pesce's 1995 book "VRML - Browsing & Building VRML", subtitled "The definitive resource for VRML technology." I am pretty sure I met Mark and got that autograph at a SIGGRAPH meeting in Boston, MA that year. There was so much excitement and energy at the time. [edit] I came back thinking, "We have got to take advantage of this." For a little while, there was an effort. The bigger players got involved, 'standards' started shifting, and the realities of our business network sunk in. Sigh.
- zwayhowder 4y ago
  Pesce is one of my claims to a brush with fame (For a very nerdy definition of fame). We were both panelists at a conference about 12-15 years ago, I was a nobody with good marketing, he was Mark Pesce. We had a great discussion about the dangers of technology taking the humanity out of services. And every now and then we still run into each other and have a meal/drink and another great discussion.
- urtie 4y ago
  I remember how I 'earned' my autographed copy... by asking 'so, how do you suppose we add interactivity to VRML? Binding with Java Applets? JavaScript?' The world these days does look quite a bit different than it did in the 1990's... and yet some things aren't.
jepler 5y ago
I worked for an industry-specific 3D cad company at the time. We wanted to create some kind of web-enabled version of our software circa 2003-2005 (totally guessing at the time frame but seems right). It feels like every choice we made was wrong and the product was never viable. VRML sort of worked with a plug-in but there was insufficient control over navigation (let alone object selection) so you couldn't really build an app "on top of" it. We also had 2D drawings, displaying them as SVG via a plug-in wasn't super good and no way could you do things like allow the user to add a fresh annotation to the SVG interactively. UI? Well, someone had the grand idea to write a mock version of Tk that would output HTML instead of X Windows API calls. That worked about as well as you'd think. Ouch. I don't know what someone operating at a more expert level would have been able to do; I was entirely self-educated in everything about browsers and had no peers to learn from. As it was, it was an exercise in frustration that was mostly shown at one trade show and then better forgotten.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  Don't blame yourself. In 2003 there really were no good options for what you wanted to do. Java Applets did exist. I think you could do 3D[0] at that time. But given that you were working with a CAD app you were almost certainly dealing with a legacy C/C++ and OpenGL codebase. There was no way to get that into a JVM in 2003 and you would either be rewriting your whole app to fit into a browser, or doing some weird server/client thing where your app just sends bits of Java to run in the browser. The preferred way to get 2D vectors in a browser in 2003 actually wasn't SVG, though - the go-to was Flash. You absolutely could have written a bunch of ActionScript to drive a user interface and draw out vector graphics. But it couldn't do 3D until way later[1]. Also, the file formats involved were extremely proprietary; the only way to generate SWFs dynamically was to wait a year and pay exorbitant sums for Macromedia Flex. Director and Shockwave were roughly the same thing as Flash but bigger. Notably it had support for native plugins for itself, called Xtras, which could run in the browser. So if you were really, really willing to get invested in the Macromedia ecosystem you could write your own 3D plugin for Shockwave[2]. Of course at that point if your CAD app had any amount of Windows support, then the easiest way to proceed would be to just ship an ActiveX control with your app in it. ActiveX was literally just COM/OLE, but on the web[3]. Assuming, again, that you already had a native app; this would have been the way to go in 2003. A lot of Windows developers handled web integration by just punting to ActiveX. It pissed people like me off, but it worked well enough. [0] Related note: This is actually how Minecraft started. [1] By the time it had both 3D and native code cross-compiling, Adobe had this hare-brained scheme to charge a revshare for using both features at once, which singlehandedly pissed off their remaining users and killed the platform faster than you can say "Thoughts on Flash". [2] Fun fact: a company called The Groove Alliance actually did that; it was called 3D Groove SX. They then realized this was silly and wrote their own standalone ActiveX control called 3D Groove GX. [3] ...without any sandboxing
cuteboy19 5y ago
Flashpoint (the Flash archival project) has a library of VRML content. https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/platforms/ https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/platforms/
a-dub 5y ago
first saw this in the 90s on an sgi indy. here's fun blog piece about the launch of sgi's webforce content creation suite which included tools for vrml. https://therealmccrea.com/tag/vrml/ https://therealmccrea.com/tag/vrml/
noahlt 5y ago
In 1997 or so, the LEGO website had a Java applet that let you explore a VRML world for their UFO theme, featuring a NASA space center with a UFO in a hangar and a Saturn-style rocket on the launchpad. As an adult I have never been able to find any information about this :(
rpmuller 5y ago
I was so excited about VRML in 1996. I thought it was going to take over the world of molecular graphics -- all we would have to do is write molecule-to-VRML translators, rather than writing free-standing OpenGL applications. It's taken a surprisingly long time to get to the point I thought we would be 25 years ago. Three.js turns out to be what everyone was looking for back then.
- bb88 5y ago
  Yeah. The hardware requirements were brutal though. I had access to SGI's back in college and they were choking on the 3d aspects for whatever reason. I remember they had VRML to WWW hooks, and navigating that would take you from one VRML world to another VRML on the web kind of like a portal. It was a fascinating way to visualize the web (kinda like an open Metaverse) and I'd like to see a return to that so that one company doesn't rule the Metaverse.
IAmGraydon 5y ago
I remember the hype around VRML when it first became a thing. It really was the same kind of hype surrounding the metaverse today. Turns out that doing most things in virtual 3D space is less efficient than just presenting them in flat 2D. The false belief is that more dimensions = better. Now this belief has materialized again as Zuck’s new baby, and I’m confident it will find the same end.
- jsemrau 5y ago
  There is a reason we are still using mouse and keyboard almost 60 years later (first prototype 1964!) It-just-works
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    I was going to mention command lines and how they mimic teletypes printing on reels of paper, but you beat me to it by a couple hours.
- philjohn 4y ago
  Or was it because the equipment available at the time was large, bulky and unaffordable? I find 3D much better when sim-racing in VR, for example. Games are more immersive, and even meetings in VR are less fatiguing than via video conference.
schmichael 5y ago
Back in 2014 I discovered Go can produce dot files of your dependency trees... ...and graphviz can produce VRML... Lots of other garbage tweets in the mix, sorry: https://twitter.com/search?q=(from%3Aschmichael)%20until%3A2014-12-13since%3A2014-12-02&src=typed_query https://twitter.com/search?q=(from%3Aschmichael)%20until%3A2...
davesque 5y ago
I remember this being somewhat associated with the rise of Java and the adoption of XML as a serialization format for the Java platform. There was an accompanying trend in which XML became the hammer with which to strike all the illusory nails, VR being one of them. I was always impressed by the degree to which things in the XML and web standards space were over engineered and abstract. It makes me think of that quote in which a famous mathematician (can't remember who, Hilbert maybe?) said that the point of mathematics was to avoid saying anything about anything. So too for a certain kind of engineering except we end up avoiding doing anything.
- twic 5y ago
  VRML isn't based on XML - the syntax is all curly brackets and spaces. The name was definitely an attempt to ride the XML hype train though. In a way, VRML was to XML as JavaScript was to Java.
  - davesque 4y ago
    Interesting, I had no idea. I stand corrected on that detail. But yeah, my comment was about the sense of hype I remember about certain technologies as they rose to popularity. I remember there was almost this funny sense that XML would solve everything. And it was connected to this broader sense at the time (owing to the dot com bubble) that technology would solve everything. Really interesting to look back on all that through the lens of time.
cropcirclbureau 5y ago
An interesting entry that links to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopaganism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopaganism
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  Yes, Technopaganism was Mark Pesce's and Owen Rowley's "thing". ;) See my previous comment about his talk about elder gods, ya ya ya, etc. Those were some extremely weird years indeed. I never ran across this delightful Wired article about all that stuff until today: https://www.wired.com/1995/07/technopagans/ https://www.wired.com/1995/07/technopagans/ >Wired Magazine: Jul 1, 1995 12:00 PM: Technopagans, by Erik Davis >May the astral plane be reborn in cyberspace >"Without the sacred there is no differentiation in space. If we are about to enter cyberspace, the first thing we have to do is plant the divine in it." >-Mark Pesce >Mark Pesce is in all ways Wired. Intensely animated and severely caffeinated, with a shaved scalp and thick black glasses, he looks every bit the hip Bay Area technonerd. Having worked in communications for more than a decade, Pesce read William Gibson's breathtaking description of cyberspace as a call to arms, and he's spent the last handful of years bringing Neuromancer's consensual hallucination to life - concocting network technologies, inventing virtual reality gadgets, tweaking the World Wide Web. Long driven to hypermedia environments, the MIT dropout has now designed a way to "perceptualize the Internet" by transforming the Web into a three-dimensional realm navigable by our budding virtual bodies. >Pesce is also a technopagan, a participant in a small but vital subculture of digital savants who keep one foot in the emerging technosphere and one foot in the wild and woolly world of Paganism. Several decades old, Paganism is an anarchic, earthy, celebratory spiritual movement that attempts to reboot the magic, myths, and gods of Europe's pre-Christian people. Pagans come in many flavors - goddess-worshippers, ceremonial magicians, witches, Radical Fairies. Though hard figures are difficult to find, estimates generally peg their numbers in the US at 100,000 to 300,000. They are almost exclusively white folks drawn from bohemian and middle-class enclaves. [...]
gene-h 5y ago
VRML is still used today. Some 3d printers take in VRML as file format, because unlike STL you can specify different colors and materials.[0][1] It's the only open multimaterial format said machines accept. [0]https://www.smg3d.co.uk/design_series/objet260_connex1 https://www.smg3d.co.uk/design_series/objet260_connex1 [1]https://prostir3d.com/en/equipment/43-photopolymers/multi-photopolymer-additive-systems/165-objet-connex3 https://prostir3d.com/en/equipment/43-photopolymers/multi-ph...
- eternityforest 4y ago
  I'm surprised 3MF doesn't have it. The history of 3D formats is littered with weird stuff that doesn't really describe everything and needs separate texture files and metadata. Meanwhile other things like text documents have embedded thumbnails and all kinds of stuff. I'd expect 3D to have multi-material plus texture support(So the same file works in VR and 3DP) by now.
  - coldacid 4y ago
    I'm pretty certain that 3MF does have that support. I had ordered STLs for miniatures from Hero Forge before, which I converted to 3MF and was able to paint and texture with Microsoft's 3D Builder. So there is definitely colour and texture support. I'm absolutely certain that physical materials are also supported in 3MF based on examinations and experimentation with the format around the time I was digitally painting my minis.
spidaman 5y ago
Does the presence of this post indicate that VRML is going to be relevant for ...anything... ever again? I have an old t-shirt around somewhere from a VRML event in the mid-90's (back when I was tinkering on making dumb little scenes a cracked AutoCAD)... yay, it's relevant again :) Personally, I've felt for a long time that as video cards and GPUs have made rendering a buzzillion polygons per second tenable, operating system developers should rethink their attachment to the two dimensional desktop metaphor that's been the interface for over three decades now. Whenever I suggest this, people tend to knee-jerk on how silly the Jurassic Park scene is with the SGI filesystem navigator (ya, the "It's unix! I know this" scene). Yep, that was the extent of our imagination working within the constraints thirty years ago but I do believe we can and should do better. But I have little confidence in the capacity of Meta or Microsoft to drive that kind of innovation, the creativity and incentives within those organizations will thwart any breakthroughs.
- Banana699 5y ago
  Personally, I don't see VR/AR/Holograms as an automatic improvement over 2D screens when it comes to UIs, those techs primary contribution is making things convincingly 3D and pretty, non-gaming UIs don't (primarily) exist to be 3D and pretty, they exist to present to you the actions you can do to a system and display the effects of said actions and the overall current state of the system. When you put it like that, it's much less clear why making things 3D is necessarily an improvement. Exceptions are many. I remember seeing Iron Man and being mind blown by the sheer ergonomicity of Stark's hologram interfaces. That's because design and engineering of the kind that Stark does are inherently tactile, he grabs hologramic models of gadgets in his hand and rotates them as if they are really there. That's insanely powerful. Any kind of design, exploratory work, or education where tactile, haptic and even thermo-pressure interfaces are superior to traditional interfaces would vastly benefit from AR and the associated technologies. Another thing is practical crafts where looking back and forth to a screen is impossible or infeasible, but imagine building a circuit while wearing glasses/contact lens showing a HUD where an annotated schematic of the circuit is displayed, or repairing a car following a graphical step-by-step tutorial (the kind shown in games) overlaid on top of the car, relevant parts of the car glow to get your attention and text appears at exactly the right time to remind you of steps. This is a whole new way of encoding knowledge, YouTube is already a small revolution in the instruction of practical crafts and cooking, imagine how much more of procedural muscle-memory knowledge we can encode with this. The 2 examples above are just to point out that I'm immensely excited for cheap and ubiquitous VR and AR and I have no shortage of fantasies about them. I'm also not saying that making boring UIs with VR and AR wouldn't make them more entertaining, maybe making tweets float around you would really make Twitter users more amused and engaged (a bad thing), although it adds no real functional value. All I'm saying is that last claim, most current UIs wouldn't benefit substantially from VR and AR except for entertainment value. They wouldn't make it any easier or more efficient on the user. What's Excel with 3D tables? a slightly more confusing Excel. The real general revolution in UI and interfaces is Neural Interfaces. Even the most basic and primitive neural interface that is basically just a vim-like system for composing a few basic mental gestures into re-bindable commands would be a massive productivity boost, every time you move the mouse or press the keyboard your thoughts start and end before your hands have done anything, imagine the raw speed if your thoughts alone are driving the computer. Forget graphical tutorials, neural interfaces would conceivably allow us to download mental models and physical skills, Matrix-style. I don't think it would be easy and I'm not even sure it's possible, but boy oh boy, is that a fun thought to imagine. It would obsolete VR and AR entirely because you can just reach into people's brain and plant images, audios, haptic sensations and emotions at will, bypassing the senses and the body completely, and possibly inventing new senses. (e.g. Zap your brain with a certain pattern of electricity representing the earth's magnetic field or the stock market dynamics, after a while it will fade into unconscious and you will have a constant gut feelings for the system that the patterns represent.) Low level access to neurons will be a gateway to wonders and horrors beyond our imagination.
ggm 5y ago
Virtual Notre Dame fly through as a Windows executable
incanus77 5y ago
I saw Jaron Lanier speak about VRML at my school in about 1997. It sounded so futuristic and so far out of reach for day-to-day. Then I forgot about it for a few decades and, well, here we are.
imgabe 5y ago
X3D seems to be the modern continuation of VRML https://www.web3d.org/x3d/what-x3d https://www.web3d.org/x3d/what-x3d
- twelvechairs 5y ago
  As far as I can see x3d has almost lost out to gltf [0] which is closer to the hardware and thus provides more rendering options [1], though x3d is sometimes seen as a "higher-level abstraction" [2] its questionable whether this makes it any easier to approach. It does allow for things like scripting, audio, video, and interactivity pretty natively and can include gltf within but I'm not sure how many applications really go down this route. A good example is 3d tiles specification [3][4] which is fast becoming a default for web and is basically gltf wrapped in json. [0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=x3d,gltf https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=x3d,gltf [1] https://realism.com/blog/gltf-x3d-comparison https://realism.com/blog/gltf-x3d-comparison [2] https://www.web3d.org/blog-integrating-x3d-and-gltf https://www.web3d.org/blog-integrating-x3d-and-gltf [3] https://docs.opengeospatial.org/cs/18-053r2/18-053r2.html https://docs.opengeospatial.org/cs/18-053r2/18-053r2.html [4] https://github.com/CesiumGS/3d-tiles/tree/main/specification https://github.com/CesiumGS/3d-tiles/tree/main/specification
  - specialist 4y ago
    Huh. Hadn't heard about glTF, thanks. Start with VRML-97's syntax, add a bunch of unnecessary quotes and colons, remove useful stuff like DEF/USE, and voila! you have glTF. At least it's not X3D.
twic 5y ago
I played around with VRML a bit around 1999 / 2000 ish. I wrote a tool which parsed the Gliese star catalogue, constructed a Delaunay triangulation, and then plotted the resulting star map in VRML. I also built castles with my then-girlfriend; she did the art direction, and i did the coding. I remember VRML 2's prototypes being very useful for that, because you could define a tower or a wall section once, then stamp out copies of it.
russellbeattie 5y ago
VRML is one of the various standards I got into for a short time, as it was going to be the next big thing, only to watch it fade into obscurity. This list includes, but not limited to, SMIL for multimedia, XSL transforms for documents, Semantic Web XML name spaces including DublinCore, OPML/RSS/Atom for blogging, XMPP for chat, SOAP for web services. I could go on. All that knowledge is just sitting there waiting for the day when its needed again. Any day now.
RistrettoMike 5y ago
I see someone else was watching LGR For context, the video by Lazy Game Reviews today showed some early snippets of Windows 95 VRML left on an old VAIO laptop: https://youtu.be/wPVIubVtdRY?t=1693 https://youtu.be/wPVIubVtdRY?t=1693 This video was the first I’d heard of the format, so it doesn’t surprise me to see others giving it a search and further share here on HN.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  The thing LGR found is called Sony SAPARi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAPARi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAPARi It actually has an active fan community believe it or not.
mathogre 5y ago
I worked with VRML in '96. It was fun and interesting. Our company even had a couple reps from SGI demonstrate it on an SGI O2 machine. The two companies at the time who were the main proponents were SGI and Sony, though SGI was clearly the primary commercial force behind VRML. SGI even produced a 3D animated "cartoon" twice a week called "Floops". Then one day in 1997 SGI announced they were no longer supporting VRML, and it was over. I personally walked away from it right then. Was VRML cool? Yes! Was it clunky? Yes. VRML had all the finesse of XML, but it worked. If you could think in 3D, you could create items fairly easily in VRML. On a Windows 95 machine (good heavens!) using Netscape with a plug-in, moving through a VRML world was not fast or smooth, but it was doable. I created a 3D version of my office to show my managers what was possible, and discussed how we might actually do some things with it. Yes there are posts here indicating VRML is being used today. For all practical purposes however, it's dead and has been for a quarter century.
garrickvanburen 4y ago
I played around with VRML in college. My biggest learning was how loading/rendering times impact overall user experience. My second biggest learning was in how quickly a new tech can completely vanish and take all your work with it.
fifticon 4y ago
I miss the tooling for VRML. I did a lot of modeling in VRML back then, but gradually all the tools have stopped working. I particularly miss the cosmos editor and browser. It had a fantastic ui, but was lost in buyups by incompetent adobe-wannabes. Also, blaxxun disappeared. I found it a very easy language to prototype 3d in. Now when I look at a-frame, i see them just reinventing a square wheel. "Oh, it is like vrml, just worse in every way..?". Sigh. Nowadays, i prototype in roblox instead, but its not the same.

VRML

150 points by vmoore 5y ago

PaulHoule 5y ago

So much fun back in the day.

vmoore 5y ago
Even more fun: https://threejs.org/ https://threejs.org/
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  I wrote my own 3D library in JS before that library came out. I am so looking forward to doing projects with WebGL.
rasz 5y ago
It wasnt fun, it was borderline scam, Web3 of its time.
- snorkel 5y ago
  Metaverse is what VRML tech was aspiring to back then, but standard dial-up internet, early web browsers, and PCs could not deliver immersive realtime 3D. It was obviously decades ahead of its time. I recall needing to install web browser plugin (I tried a few), then the VRML scene file takes a while to download (dial-up) and then draws an ugly 3D scene in the browser. Then the mouse navigation was horrible. No collision detection of course so you could easily fly through the floor, end up upside down, walk through objects, etc. No sound. No chat. No multi-user. At least it had level of detail optimization so processing wasn't on distant details. Then you'd click on a link in the scene and it would either load a different 3D scene, or jump you back out to a plain old 2D web page in the web browser. And of course you'd be looking at this on a plain old 17-inch CRT screen (no VR headset). I see my Oculus collecting dust and I feel VR tech has improved by a lot, but still, meh.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    I used VRML for my thesis work where I was visualizing an energy surface in a 6 dimensional space and understanding the bifurcations where it would get holes, start to wrap around the space, break into separate pieces, etc. I had all sorts of complaints around what VRML couldn’t do at that time, particularly how you’d inevitably get your back turned to what you were supposed to look at, have a hard time turning around, and the people developing the world don’t care. Looking back with insight from ‘the metaverse’ I see the problem as a lack of storytelling or the facilities for storytelling. The idea that you’re going to bum around in some virtual world and indulge your narcissism in parallel to how you indulge your narcissism in the real world still appeals to those who want to subject us to ‘experiences’ even if it doesn’t for end users. I started studying theme park design a few months back because I was interested in seducing people (which you could win at 100% of the time if you had 100% control of the environment.) The metaverse fad came up and it gave me a good mental model of what’s missing in the metaverse…. Storytelling! Many people in 2022 are inclined to accept you can have fiction without storytelling because we’re so used to fiction that is driven by characters and setting (say Star Wars or My Little Pony Friendship is Magic). Somebody even pointed out to be that those Victorian novels I couldn’t stand in high school were part of this trend. Some point people will realize that ‘the line is going up’ (NFTs) isn’t a good enough story but until VR designers adopt storytelling ideas from theme parks people will be snoozing.
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      This is good insight. Storytelling over function.
    - kmeisthax 5y ago
      "storytelling ideas from theme parks" Videogames call this "environmental storytelling" and it's a really solid way of constructing a narrative in such spaces. The reason why the current or prior generations of "metaverse" technologies don't do this is because they're not trying to be a narrative work. They're trying to be "HTTP for 3D worlds" - in other words, hoping someone else will come in and build the narrative on top of their platform so they can charge the creators a fee to publish their own work.
- pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
  Did people use to lose all their savings on VRML?

ajconway 5y ago

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown 20 years later we're finally somewhat there with VR Chat and Horizon.

astlouis44 5y ago

WebAssembly, WebGPU, and WebXR are the new VRML and will pave the way for an open, platform-agnostic metaverse where sites becomes worlds, hyperlinks becomes portals, profile pictures become avatars, and profiles become personal homes or spaces others can visit. Interestingly, Meta's CTO just let slip yesterday about a web version of Horizon: https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/14/23025899/meta-horizon-worlds-web-version-metaverse-platform https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/14/23025899/meta-horizon-wor...

jdrc 5y ago
i honestly want to know what people are smoking . We've had these things for 30 years, with SL and minecraft and VRchat etc. it's a small niche
- chriswarbo 5y ago
  There was some pressure to get SecondLife open-sourced and federated, but IIRC it didn't really get anywhere. On the other hand, projects like Croquet/Qwak/Cobalt have been open-source for over a decade; are federated/P2P; already have "hyperlink portals" like parent commented; support existing standards like XMPP, VNC, etc.; have been ported to Javascript; etc. And yet, they seem effectively dead :(
  - jdrc 5y ago
    > to get SecondLife open-sourced and federated That's opensimulator
  - mintplant 5y ago
    The SL client ("viewer") has been open source for a very long time, and there used to be a thriving ecosystem of third-party forks. Nowadays Firestorm [0] is the one everyone uses. The server software remains closed source. OpenSim [1], a community-driven reimplementation with federation support, has been around for a while but as you say hasn't really gone anywhere since the original wave of metaverse hype died down. [0] https://www.firestormviewer.org https://www.firestormviewer.org [1] http://opensimulator.org http://opensimulator.org

srvmshr 5y ago

The way I learnt about VRML was FAS website. As a young teenager, I used to obsess over fighter planes. Then I stumbled upon the weapons & equipment pages on Federation of American Scientists (FAS) website. See [1] as an example. They had WRL files (a VRML format) for most planes in their inventory. 15 years ago that was cool. (1) https://nuke.fas.org/guide/russia/airdef/mig-23.htm https://nuke.fas.org/guide/russia/airdef/mig-23.htm

dang 5y ago

Surprisingly little previous discussion: VRML was a standard in 1995 but now everyone's excited about The Metaverse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29237519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29237519 - Nov 2021 (4 comments) Ask HN: Is VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) Relevant to Metaverse? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29111474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29111474 - Nov 2021 (2 comments) VRML – Virtual Reality Markup Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29046541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29046541 - Oct 2021 (3 comments) VRML (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28374558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28374558 - Aug 2021 (1 comment) A free Java VRML Viewer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24805346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24805346 - Oct 2020 (1 comment)

madrox 5y ago
One of those is my submission. I posted it in response to all the buzz over figuring out VR markup. It seems to me no one wants to actually use existing stuff. People are just having fun reinventing it.
- mathgladiator 5y ago
  During my limited time at FRL (i.e. Meta), I tried to be a proponent of X3D (successor of VRML), and the push back I got was tremendous. You're right that people want to reinvent it.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    Well, thanks for fighting for standards adoption, even if it didn't work out. It's always good to have interoperability represented on the inside.
  - em-bee 5y ago
    how did that pushback look like? to old? failed technology? i saw a lot of excitement around VRML at the university in the late 90s. the problem was that average computers just didn't have the capacity for 3d rendering back then. at the university we had high end SGI workstations, and of course these were used for impressive demonstrations of what VRML could do. but i guess because noone outside had computers capable enough it didn't catch on. the current generation is not aware of what we did back then and may not realize that lack of performance was the primary problem we were facing.

oh_sigh 5y ago

I became known as the tech wiz of my school in 1998(7th grade) when I made a little 3d forest scene using VRML for a class project instead of a diorama. It was fun, but even then I had to question what the heck this could possibly be used for.

sbayeta 5y ago

> It has been superseded by X3D.

dec0dedab0de 5y ago

I remember seeing vrml sites in 96 or 97 and thinking I was so far behind because I couldn't figure out how to do it.

xtracto 5y ago

I did a project with VRML around 1999. It was an application for "real time" monitoring of emergency ships, helicopters and other vehicles when they were dispatched to oil platforms in distress within the Gulf of Mexico. It was a nice toy but rely useless at that time,and a resource hog for computers of that moment. Still a fun project.

henriquez 5y ago

Frank Zappa had a VRML website of his recording studio called The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen. My computer in the mid-90s was barely capable of rendering it but I remember being in awe of how cool it was.

spidaman 5y ago
This gets an upvote merely for citing Frank Zappa in any way

nvader 5y ago

FTA, under "Criticism": > Every time VRML practitioners approach the problem of how to represent space on the screen, they have no focused reason to make any particular trade-off of detail versus rendering speed, or making objects versus making spaces, because VRML isn't for anything except itself. Many times, having a particular, near-term need to solve brings a project's virtues into sharp focus, and gives it enough clarity to live on its own. > > Clay Shirky

tootie 5y ago
Replace "VRML" with everything being done on the web3 space.
DonHopkins 5y ago
I once asked Mark Pesche: What about time? What about scripting? "We'll add those later." But you need both from the start. "VR" is not a 3D still life painting. One of the most common annoying question lots of people asked Mark at the time was "How does VRML relate to XML?" to which the annoying answer was "it doesn't". All that relentless XML badgering from XML drones eventually drove Mark to the point of publishing a vitriolic anti-XML diatribe in high dudgeon, based on the premise that Microsoft was going in whole hog on XML, therefore XML was Evil, because Microsoft is Evil, so you shouldn't use XML, because Microsoft ruined XML, and you should use VRML, because VRML doesn't use XML, which is the great thing about VRML. Might as well combine the anti-Microsoft fervor with the anti-XML backlash of the times to promote VRML. XML certainly is evil, but not because of Microsoft supporting it! This annoying misconception about VRML using XML may be why they eventually retronymed VRML from "Virtual Reality Markup Language" to "Virtual Reality Modeling Language" at one point. (YAML went through the same "oops" realization). He also wrote another epic diatribe dramatically comparing himself and the VRML inner cabal to the true elder gods of old mythology, who after creating the universe and starting it going, were finally going to step aside and let the new kingdom of mankind and their lesser imaginary gods take over their own fate and bla bla bla... I haven't been able to dig up any archives of whatever mailing list I read that stuff on, but if anybody has some of the old school vrml mailing list archives sitting around, I'd love to have a link or a copy -- it was terrific entertainment!

Yhdz 5y ago

In 2000 I did an internship at a Dutch media company and created a 3D VRML video site. The interesting thing for me at the time was that the server composed the final VRML by combining a template with database results, similar to PHP. I have no idea how common this was, but I was pretty proud of it at the time:) Unfortunately VRML plug-ins where not that great, even worse when I needed them to be able to play real video, so it was never deployed.

jandrese 5y ago
Oh yeah, I remember the VRML plugins with their horrendous navigation solutions. POTS Modems were also insufficient to reasonably stream scenes of any complexity. It was a technology about 10 years ahead of its time. I always considered the successor to be SecondLife. I guess the Metaverse is trying to be the successor to SecondLife, but I think they're trying to solve the wrong problems with it and are not likely to be successful.
- Yhdz 4y ago
  One thing I learned in that internship is that 2D is way more useful for navigating most information than 3D environments. Only when the information itself is 3D it becomes more valuable, and even then a projection to 2D might give a better overview. Games have done Metaverse like 3D multiplayer environments for years now, but always combined with gameplay or construction elements. I don’t really see the point of going to a 3D chat environment if there are no work/entertainment benefits in them that are clearly superior in 3D.
ilaksh 5y ago
You could do the same thing today with A-Frame VR.

mellosouls 5y ago

Related - and to add to the comments claiming the superceding standard - OpenXR: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenXR https://wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenXR

astlouis44 5y ago
No actually it’s WebGPU, WebAssembly, and WebXR
singularity2001 4y ago
Trying to find any live examples or sample code I ended up with this: https://www.khronos.org/openxr/ https://www.khronos.org/openxr/ => static const XrDebugUtilsMessageTypeFlagsEXT XR_DEBUG_UTILS_MESSAGE_TYPE_CONFORMANCE_BIT_EXT = 0x00000008; This is conceptually on the other end of VRML and it's not clear if 3D rendering in the browser is even one of its goals

Aspos 5y ago

I vividly remember watching Mir space station deorbiting in VRML in real-time in 2001. It seemed normal back then, but looking back it is unbelievable how smooth the whole experience was given the state of the internet in 2001. Edit: Wow, the site still exists! http://www.parallelgraphics.com/vrml/mir2/ http://www.parallelgraphics.com/vrml/mir2/

ajconway 5y ago
Looks wonderful in 2022: "Each scene is 100KB in size. It may take up to a minute for the scene to load, so please be patient."
- dylan604 5y ago
  "Sorry, this platform is not supported by Cortona VRML browser which is needed to display VRML scenes. " No recommendations on what is supported though. I'm guessing best viewed in IE at 800x600

bawolff 5y ago

When i was young, one of the only "real" computer books my local public library had was on vrml. I still remember it quite fondly.

nfrankel 5y ago

Funny to see this here. More than twenty years ago, I did my Master thesis in Architecture using VRML to display a building I had designed and the surrounding district. I especially loved the Level-Of-Detail object that allows to design different objects depending on the distance of the object with the view point. I still have the files somewhere, but last time I checked, I found no software to read them.

jbgreer 5y ago

I still have my autographed copy of Mark Pesce's 1995 book "VRML - Browsing & Building VRML", subtitled "The definitive resource for VRML technology." I am pretty sure I met Mark and got that autograph at a SIGGRAPH meeting in Boston, MA that year. There was so much excitement and energy at the time. [edit] I came back thinking, "We have got to take advantage of this." For a little while, there was an effort. The bigger players got involved, 'standards' started shifting, and the realities of our business network sunk in. Sigh.

zwayhowder 4y ago
Pesce is one of my claims to a brush with fame (For a very nerdy definition of fame). We were both panelists at a conference about 12-15 years ago, I was a nobody with good marketing, he was Mark Pesce. We had a great discussion about the dangers of technology taking the humanity out of services. And every now and then we still run into each other and have a meal/drink and another great discussion.
urtie 4y ago
I remember how I 'earned' my autographed copy... by asking 'so, how do you suppose we add interactivity to VRML? Binding with Java Applets? JavaScript?' The world these days does look quite a bit different than it did in the 1990's... and yet some things aren't.

jepler 5y ago

I worked for an industry-specific 3D cad company at the time. We wanted to create some kind of web-enabled version of our software circa 2003-2005 (totally guessing at the time frame but seems right). It feels like every choice we made was wrong and the product was never viable. VRML sort of worked with a plug-in but there was insufficient control over navigation (let alone object selection) so you couldn't really build an app "on top of" it. We also had 2D drawings, displaying them as SVG via a plug-in wasn't super good and no way could you do things like allow the user to add a fresh annotation to the SVG interactively. UI? Well, someone had the grand idea to write a mock version of Tk that would output HTML instead of X Windows API calls. That worked about as well as you'd think. Ouch. I don't know what someone operating at a more expert level would have been able to do; I was entirely self-educated in everything about browsers and had no peers to learn from. As it was, it was an exercise in frustration that was mostly shown at one trade show and then better forgotten.

kmeisthax 4y ago
Don't blame yourself. In 2003 there really were no good options for what you wanted to do. Java Applets did exist. I think you could do 3D[0] at that time. But given that you were working with a CAD app you were almost certainly dealing with a legacy C/C++ and OpenGL codebase. There was no way to get that into a JVM in 2003 and you would either be rewriting your whole app to fit into a browser, or doing some weird server/client thing where your app just sends bits of Java to run in the browser. The preferred way to get 2D vectors in a browser in 2003 actually wasn't SVG, though - the go-to was Flash. You absolutely could have written a bunch of ActionScript to drive a user interface and draw out vector graphics. But it couldn't do 3D until way later[1]. Also, the file formats involved were extremely proprietary; the only way to generate SWFs dynamically was to wait a year and pay exorbitant sums for Macromedia Flex. Director and Shockwave were roughly the same thing as Flash but bigger. Notably it had support for native plugins for itself, called Xtras, which could run in the browser. So if you were really, really willing to get invested in the Macromedia ecosystem you could write your own 3D plugin for Shockwave[2]. Of course at that point if your CAD app had any amount of Windows support, then the easiest way to proceed would be to just ship an ActiveX control with your app in it. ActiveX was literally just COM/OLE, but on the web[3]. Assuming, again, that you already had a native app; this would have been the way to go in 2003. A lot of Windows developers handled web integration by just punting to ActiveX. It pissed people like me off, but it worked well enough. [0] Related note: This is actually how Minecraft started. [1] By the time it had both 3D and native code cross-compiling, Adobe had this hare-brained scheme to charge a revshare for using both features at once, which singlehandedly pissed off their remaining users and killed the platform faster than you can say "Thoughts on Flash". [2] Fun fact: a company called The Groove Alliance actually did that; it was called 3D Groove SX. They then realized this was silly and wrote their own standalone ActiveX control called 3D Groove GX. [3] ...without any sandboxing

cuteboy19 5y ago

Flashpoint (the Flash archival project) has a library of VRML content. https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/platforms/ https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/platforms/

a-dub 5y ago

first saw this in the 90s on an sgi indy. here's fun blog piece about the launch of sgi's webforce content creation suite which included tools for vrml. https://therealmccrea.com/tag/vrml/ https://therealmccrea.com/tag/vrml/

noahlt 5y ago

In 1997 or so, the LEGO website had a Java applet that let you explore a VRML world for their UFO theme, featuring a NASA space center with a UFO in a hangar and a Saturn-style rocket on the launchpad. As an adult I have never been able to find any information about this :(

rpmuller 5y ago

I was so excited about VRML in 1996. I thought it was going to take over the world of molecular graphics -- all we would have to do is write molecule-to-VRML translators, rather than writing free-standing OpenGL applications. It's taken a surprisingly long time to get to the point I thought we would be 25 years ago. Three.js turns out to be what everyone was looking for back then.

bb88 5y ago
Yeah. The hardware requirements were brutal though. I had access to SGI's back in college and they were choking on the 3d aspects for whatever reason. I remember they had VRML to WWW hooks, and navigating that would take you from one VRML world to another VRML on the web kind of like a portal. It was a fascinating way to visualize the web (kinda like an open Metaverse) and I'd like to see a return to that so that one company doesn't rule the Metaverse.

IAmGraydon 5y ago

I remember the hype around VRML when it first became a thing. It really was the same kind of hype surrounding the metaverse today. Turns out that doing most things in virtual 3D space is less efficient than just presenting them in flat 2D. The false belief is that more dimensions = better. Now this belief has materialized again as Zuck’s new baby, and I’m confident it will find the same end.

jsemrau 5y ago
There is a reason we are still using mouse and keyboard almost 60 years later (first prototype 1964!) It-just-works
- rbanffy 4y ago
  I was going to mention command lines and how they mimic teletypes printing on reels of paper, but you beat me to it by a couple hours.
philjohn 4y ago
Or was it because the equipment available at the time was large, bulky and unaffordable? I find 3D much better when sim-racing in VR, for example. Games are more immersive, and even meetings in VR are less fatiguing than via video conference.

schmichael 5y ago

Back in 2014 I discovered Go can produce dot files of your dependency trees... ...and graphviz can produce VRML... Lots of other garbage tweets in the mix, sorry: https://twitter.com/search?q=(from%3Aschmichael)%20until%3A2014-12-13since%3A2014-12-02&src=typed_query https://twitter.com/search?q=(from%3Aschmichael)%20until%3A2...

davesque 5y ago

I remember this being somewhat associated with the rise of Java and the adoption of XML as a serialization format for the Java platform. There was an accompanying trend in which XML became the hammer with which to strike all the illusory nails, VR being one of them. I was always impressed by the degree to which things in the XML and web standards space were over engineered and abstract. It makes me think of that quote in which a famous mathematician (can't remember who, Hilbert maybe?) said that the point of mathematics was to avoid saying anything about anything. So too for a certain kind of engineering except we end up avoiding doing anything.

twic 5y ago
VRML isn't based on XML - the syntax is all curly brackets and spaces. The name was definitely an attempt to ride the XML hype train though. In a way, VRML was to XML as JavaScript was to Java.
- davesque 4y ago
  Interesting, I had no idea. I stand corrected on that detail. But yeah, my comment was about the sense of hype I remember about certain technologies as they rose to popularity. I remember there was almost this funny sense that XML would solve everything. And it was connected to this broader sense at the time (owing to the dot com bubble) that technology would solve everything. Really interesting to look back on all that through the lens of time.

cropcirclbureau 5y ago

An interesting entry that links to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopaganism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopaganism

DonHopkins 4y ago
Yes, Technopaganism was Mark Pesce's and Owen Rowley's "thing". ;) See my previous comment about his talk about elder gods, ya ya ya, etc. Those were some extremely weird years indeed. I never ran across this delightful Wired article about all that stuff until today: https://www.wired.com/1995/07/technopagans/ https://www.wired.com/1995/07/technopagans/ >Wired Magazine: Jul 1, 1995 12:00 PM: Technopagans, by Erik Davis >May the astral plane be reborn in cyberspace >"Without the sacred there is no differentiation in space. If we are about to enter cyberspace, the first thing we have to do is plant the divine in it." >-Mark Pesce >Mark Pesce is in all ways Wired. Intensely animated and severely caffeinated, with a shaved scalp and thick black glasses, he looks every bit the hip Bay Area technonerd. Having worked in communications for more than a decade, Pesce read William Gibson's breathtaking description of cyberspace as a call to arms, and he's spent the last handful of years bringing Neuromancer's consensual hallucination to life - concocting network technologies, inventing virtual reality gadgets, tweaking the World Wide Web. Long driven to hypermedia environments, the MIT dropout has now designed a way to "perceptualize the Internet" by transforming the Web into a three-dimensional realm navigable by our budding virtual bodies. >Pesce is also a technopagan, a participant in a small but vital subculture of digital savants who keep one foot in the emerging technosphere and one foot in the wild and woolly world of Paganism. Several decades old, Paganism is an anarchic, earthy, celebratory spiritual movement that attempts to reboot the magic, myths, and gods of Europe's pre-Christian people. Pagans come in many flavors - goddess-worshippers, ceremonial magicians, witches, Radical Fairies. Though hard figures are difficult to find, estimates generally peg their numbers in the US at 100,000 to 300,000. They are almost exclusively white folks drawn from bohemian and middle-class enclaves. [...]

gene-h 5y ago

VRML is still used today. Some 3d printers take in VRML as file format, because unlike STL you can specify different colors and materials.[0][1] It's the only open multimaterial format said machines accept. [0]https://www.smg3d.co.uk/design_series/objet260_connex1 https://www.smg3d.co.uk/design_series/objet260_connex1 [1]https://prostir3d.com/en/equipment/43-photopolymers/multi-photopolymer-additive-systems/165-objet-connex3 https://prostir3d.com/en/equipment/43-photopolymers/multi-ph...

eternityforest 4y ago
I'm surprised 3MF doesn't have it. The history of 3D formats is littered with weird stuff that doesn't really describe everything and needs separate texture files and metadata. Meanwhile other things like text documents have embedded thumbnails and all kinds of stuff. I'd expect 3D to have multi-material plus texture support(So the same file works in VR and 3DP) by now.
- coldacid 4y ago
  I'm pretty certain that 3MF does have that support. I had ordered STLs for miniatures from Hero Forge before, which I converted to 3MF and was able to paint and texture with Microsoft's 3D Builder. So there is definitely colour and texture support. I'm absolutely certain that physical materials are also supported in 3MF based on examinations and experimentation with the format around the time I was digitally painting my minis.

spidaman 5y ago

Does the presence of this post indicate that VRML is going to be relevant for ...anything... ever again? I have an old t-shirt around somewhere from a VRML event in the mid-90's (back when I was tinkering on making dumb little scenes a cracked AutoCAD)... yay, it's relevant again :) Personally, I've felt for a long time that as video cards and GPUs have made rendering a buzzillion polygons per second tenable, operating system developers should rethink their attachment to the two dimensional desktop metaphor that's been the interface for over three decades now. Whenever I suggest this, people tend to knee-jerk on how silly the Jurassic Park scene is with the SGI filesystem navigator (ya, the "It's unix! I know this" scene). Yep, that was the extent of our imagination working within the constraints thirty years ago but I do believe we can and should do better. But I have little confidence in the capacity of Meta or Microsoft to drive that kind of innovation, the creativity and incentives within those organizations will thwart any breakthroughs.

Banana699 5y ago
Personally, I don't see VR/AR/Holograms as an automatic improvement over 2D screens when it comes to UIs, those techs primary contribution is making things convincingly 3D and pretty, non-gaming UIs don't (primarily) exist to be 3D and pretty, they exist to present to you the actions you can do to a system and display the effects of said actions and the overall current state of the system. When you put it like that, it's much less clear why making things 3D is necessarily an improvement. Exceptions are many. I remember seeing Iron Man and being mind blown by the sheer ergonomicity of Stark's hologram interfaces. That's because design and engineering of the kind that Stark does are inherently tactile, he grabs hologramic models of gadgets in his hand and rotates them as if they are really there. That's insanely powerful. Any kind of design, exploratory work, or education where tactile, haptic and even thermo-pressure interfaces are superior to traditional interfaces would vastly benefit from AR and the associated technologies. Another thing is practical crafts where looking back and forth to a screen is impossible or infeasible, but imagine building a circuit while wearing glasses/contact lens showing a HUD where an annotated schematic of the circuit is displayed, or repairing a car following a graphical step-by-step tutorial (the kind shown in games) overlaid on top of the car, relevant parts of the car glow to get your attention and text appears at exactly the right time to remind you of steps. This is a whole new way of encoding knowledge, YouTube is already a small revolution in the instruction of practical crafts and cooking, imagine how much more of procedural muscle-memory knowledge we can encode with this. The 2 examples above are just to point out that I'm immensely excited for cheap and ubiquitous VR and AR and I have no shortage of fantasies about them. I'm also not saying that making boring UIs with VR and AR wouldn't make them more entertaining, maybe making tweets float around you would really make Twitter users more amused and engaged (a bad thing), although it adds no real functional value. All I'm saying is that last claim, most current UIs wouldn't benefit substantially from VR and AR except for entertainment value. They wouldn't make it any easier or more efficient on the user. What's Excel with 3D tables? a slightly more confusing Excel. The real general revolution in UI and interfaces is Neural Interfaces. Even the most basic and primitive neural interface that is basically just a vim-like system for composing a few basic mental gestures into re-bindable commands would be a massive productivity boost, every time you move the mouse or press the keyboard your thoughts start and end before your hands have done anything, imagine the raw speed if your thoughts alone are driving the computer. Forget graphical tutorials, neural interfaces would conceivably allow us to download mental models and physical skills, Matrix-style. I don't think it would be easy and I'm not even sure it's possible, but boy oh boy, is that a fun thought to imagine. It would obsolete VR and AR entirely because you can just reach into people's brain and plant images, audios, haptic sensations and emotions at will, bypassing the senses and the body completely, and possibly inventing new senses. (e.g. Zap your brain with a certain pattern of electricity representing the earth's magnetic field or the stock market dynamics, after a while it will fade into unconscious and you will have a constant gut feelings for the system that the patterns represent.) Low level access to neurons will be a gateway to wonders and horrors beyond our imagination.

ggm 5y ago

Virtual Notre Dame fly through as a Windows executable

incanus77 5y ago

I saw Jaron Lanier speak about VRML at my school in about 1997. It sounded so futuristic and so far out of reach for day-to-day. Then I forgot about it for a few decades and, well, here we are.

imgabe 5y ago

X3D seems to be the modern continuation of VRML https://www.web3d.org/x3d/what-x3d https://www.web3d.org/x3d/what-x3d

twelvechairs 5y ago
As far as I can see x3d has almost lost out to gltf [0] which is closer to the hardware and thus provides more rendering options [1], though x3d is sometimes seen as a "higher-level abstraction" [2] its questionable whether this makes it any easier to approach. It does allow for things like scripting, audio, video, and interactivity pretty natively and can include gltf within but I'm not sure how many applications really go down this route. A good example is 3d tiles specification [3][4] which is fast becoming a default for web and is basically gltf wrapped in json. [0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=x3d,gltf https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=x3d,gltf [1] https://realism.com/blog/gltf-x3d-comparison https://realism.com/blog/gltf-x3d-comparison [2] https://www.web3d.org/blog-integrating-x3d-and-gltf https://www.web3d.org/blog-integrating-x3d-and-gltf [3] https://docs.opengeospatial.org/cs/18-053r2/18-053r2.html https://docs.opengeospatial.org/cs/18-053r2/18-053r2.html [4] https://github.com/CesiumGS/3d-tiles/tree/main/specification https://github.com/CesiumGS/3d-tiles/tree/main/specification
- specialist 4y ago
  Huh. Hadn't heard about glTF, thanks. Start with VRML-97's syntax, add a bunch of unnecessary quotes and colons, remove useful stuff like DEF/USE, and voila! you have glTF. At least it's not X3D.

twic 5y ago

I played around with VRML a bit around 1999 / 2000 ish. I wrote a tool which parsed the Gliese star catalogue, constructed a Delaunay triangulation, and then plotted the resulting star map in VRML. I also built castles with my then-girlfriend; she did the art direction, and i did the coding. I remember VRML 2's prototypes being very useful for that, because you could define a tower or a wall section once, then stamp out copies of it.

russellbeattie 5y ago

VRML is one of the various standards I got into for a short time, as it was going to be the next big thing, only to watch it fade into obscurity. This list includes, but not limited to, SMIL for multimedia, XSL transforms for documents, Semantic Web XML name spaces including DublinCore, OPML/RSS/Atom for blogging, XMPP for chat, SOAP for web services. I could go on. All that knowledge is just sitting there waiting for the day when its needed again. Any day now.

RistrettoMike 5y ago

I see someone else was watching LGR For context, the video by Lazy Game Reviews today showed some early snippets of Windows 95 VRML left on an old VAIO laptop: https://youtu.be/wPVIubVtdRY?t=1693 https://youtu.be/wPVIubVtdRY?t=1693 This video was the first I’d heard of the format, so it doesn’t surprise me to see others giving it a search and further share here on HN.

kmeisthax 4y ago
The thing LGR found is called Sony SAPARi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAPARi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAPARi It actually has an active fan community believe it or not.

mathogre 5y ago

I worked with VRML in '96. It was fun and interesting. Our company even had a couple reps from SGI demonstrate it on an SGI O2 machine. The two companies at the time who were the main proponents were SGI and Sony, though SGI was clearly the primary commercial force behind VRML. SGI even produced a 3D animated "cartoon" twice a week called "Floops". Then one day in 1997 SGI announced they were no longer supporting VRML, and it was over. I personally walked away from it right then. Was VRML cool? Yes! Was it clunky? Yes. VRML had all the finesse of XML, but it worked. If you could think in 3D, you could create items fairly easily in VRML. On a Windows 95 machine (good heavens!) using Netscape with a plug-in, moving through a VRML world was not fast or smooth, but it was doable. I created a 3D version of my office to show my managers what was possible, and discussed how we might actually do some things with it. Yes there are posts here indicating VRML is being used today. For all practical purposes however, it's dead and has been for a quarter century.

garrickvanburen 4y ago

I played around with VRML in college. My biggest learning was how loading/rendering times impact overall user experience. My second biggest learning was in how quickly a new tech can completely vanish and take all your work with it.

fifticon 4y ago

I miss the tooling for VRML. I did a lot of modeling in VRML back then, but gradually all the tools have stopped working. I particularly miss the cosmos editor and browser. It had a fantastic ui, but was lost in buyups by incompetent adobe-wannabes. Also, blaxxun disappeared. I found it a very easy language to prototype 3d in. Now when I look at a-frame, i see them just reinventing a square wheel. "Oh, it is like vrml, just worse in every way..?". Sigh. Nowadays, i prototype in roblox instead, but its not the same.