Whatever Happened to VRML?

Question

Back in the late 1990s, when I was at grad school VRML was going to take over the world. My peers and I built all manner of useful and interesting things with it by hooking it up to Java and Javascript code.

Of course back then computers were many times slower than they are now - multicore CPUs were largely the stuff of science fiction or hush-hush research projects and our VRML applications ran just that little bit too slowly to catch on in the real world.

A decade on, even a cheap PC with a bog-standard GPU would happily run any of our VRML models with ease and possibly might require throttling to ensure they weren't so fast as to be unusable. But the VRML community has died a bit of a death, web-3d hasn't caught on and I can't even find a browser plug-in. X3d was mentioned a while back but that too hasn't caught on.

Does anybody have any ideas what happened? Is there some other 3D web technology I'm not aware of?

Answer 1

I think the idea was that people would enjoy using 3d interface to navigate information.

This proved incorrect. People use 3D interfaces pretty much exclusively for gaming (or for specialized purposes, such as architecture, engineering or medicine).

During the 90s there was a mini-explosion of technology based around this idea. I remember that Apple designed a 3D browsing system (the name escapes me) that never went off the ground.

In the end, it's far easier for humans to scan 2D representations for information and navigate that way.

Answer 2

http://cafe.elharo.com/ui/why-vrml-failed-and-what-that-means-for-openoffice/

Answer 3

There have been various inroads with these technologies with each one pretty much failing. In the past, this is probably due to the internet being used as a resource for fast information and peoples frustration in waiting for such information. These technologies have bubbled away under the surface, many of which have been game related and usually delivered as plugins such as virtools, shockwave, unity, etc, but many of which have had one major failing, their reliance/lack of hardware acceleration. This is especially an issue since the stablility and speed of the browsing is of paramount concern for most users so the problemas arise when needing to include all sort of hardware configuration files with a given plugin (The size starts to become huge), and of course 3d data is usually larger than it's 2d equivalent.

There are still ongoing attempts to provide 3D systems for interface design etc, webgl on webkit is ongoing development, but for hardware based engines, the issue is, does the user have the hardware? If not, then the developer has more work to port to other systems or quite frankly, the content is not accessible.