4 ms·
Oh man, VR and metaverse-style concepts were big in the 90s even if the technology obviously wasn't quite there yet. Active Worlds predated Second Life by sever
by faefox 4y ago
Oh man, VR and metaverse-style concepts were big in the 90s even if the technology obviously wasn't quite there yet. Active Worlds predated Second Life by several years and surprisingly enough is still online to this day.
- jansan 4y agoThat is fascinating and deserves its own HN thread.
- squarefoot 4y agoI recall watching on TV a VR demo with sensor gloves connected to a Mac where the demonstrator would grab and manipulate objects in 3D. That was in the mid-80s.
- antod 4y agoI remember VRML going nowhere fast.
- irrational 4y agoI read a book on vrml back in the 90s and was convinced it was going to be huge.
- giantrobot 4y agoVRML was a technology that was way ahead of its time. Hardware of the time just could not deliver a good experience with it. Even high end SGI hardware (the land of VRML's birth) struggled with it. By the time commodity hardware got to the point it could deliver, interest and support of VRML was long expired. Contrast VRML to a game like Quake. One of the key optimizations in Quake was a very computationally expensive pre-processing of the game map to determine surface visibility. The map environment was also a simplified set or surfaces rather than a giant tree of arbitrary primitives. VRML had almost the opposite Design leaving the client to do a ton of work just to construct the usable representation of the virtual environment and then figure out what to draw. It also didn't help the client software often had terrible UIs and were implemented as browser plugins.
- unhammer 4y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FGzE4endQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FGzE4endQ is a nice and accurate demonstration of the 90's VR dream