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 u

Answer 1

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.