I miss the 3D web. In the late 90's Silicon Graphics machines came with an out of the box experience delivered by Netscape Navigator. The page was rendered in frames, so you only downloaded the navigation frames once, not with every click.
Some of this navigation and some of this content was in VRML that you could interact with. The full product tour could be explored in a 3D world. The UI UX did not seem OTT. It felt like the future.
It turned out that the excellent CosmoWorlds VRML authorship tools were just a little bit ahead of their time and there was little of the expected interest. We ended up with a flat 2D web rather than a 3D web. Sure this makes sense but the tools you have available frame how you solve problems.
Also out the box was a web server. You put HTML (and VRML) in your shared web folder and your machine instantly had your stuff available on the local network and you could route to the machine from the internet if you had the networking skills to set that up.
It was all in the original Tim Berners Lee vision, you could imagine how this would make sense in academia, with academics in a department able to put all their work/knowledge on the web very easily.
In this SGI version of the 3D web it was the javascript that glued it all together, VRML was made useful with scripting which could go across those frames to put together an awesome web experience, rose tinted spectacles accepted.
We aren't even thinking along those lines these days. The web has gone, we have platforms now.
There's been good webgl & webgpu work. Whats been sad is that none of this is hypermedia like. I kept hoping I could someday have some DOM surfaces I could put inside the 3d game.
Apple's been driving a "model" element for the web. Personally Im unthrilled that it's an object but bereft of an environment; there s no real space or navigability.
Some of this navigation and some of this content was in VRML that you could interact with. The full product tour could be explored in a 3D world. The UI UX did not seem OTT. It felt like the future.
It turned out that the excellent CosmoWorlds VRML authorship tools were just a little bit ahead of their time and there was little of the expected interest. We ended up with a flat 2D web rather than a 3D web. Sure this makes sense but the tools you have available frame how you solve problems.
Also out the box was a web server. You put HTML (and VRML) in your shared web folder and your machine instantly had your stuff available on the local network and you could route to the machine from the internet if you had the networking skills to set that up.
It was all in the original Tim Berners Lee vision, you could imagine how this would make sense in academia, with academics in a department able to put all their work/knowledge on the web very easily.
In this SGI version of the 3D web it was the javascript that glued it all together, VRML was made useful with scripting which could go across those frames to put together an awesome web experience, rose tinted spectacles accepted.
We aren't even thinking along those lines these days. The web has gone, we have platforms now.