VRML 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 lan

VRML 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.