One of the big tech stories of 2016 was the rebirth of virtual reality. Home hardware from HTC, Oculus, Sony, and even Google brought 3D immersion to a whole new audience, and we're seeing some seriously cool software being made to take advantage of it. If you've spent any time with programs like Tilt Brush you're aware of how neat this stuff is going to get.
But this isn't virtual reality's first rodeo. In the 1990s, despite significantly worse technology, designers tried to make VR games, applications, and even Web pages.
You read that right: Web pages. A whole markup language was written to turn browsing into a 3D, first-person experience. It was called VRML, and we're going to tell you all about it.
Baby Steps
The first International Conference on the World Wide Web in 1994 was a pivotal moment in the development of the modern Internet. Computer scientists from all over the world came to Geneva to lay the groundwork for this exciting new medium. One of those men was Dave Raggett, a leading hand in the development of much of the modern Internet protocol.
While the other computer scientists at the conference were occupied with transfer protocols and naming conventions, Raggett looked to push the new world closer to the one we knew. Working from a heated email discussion, he wrote out the specification for the first version of a set of instructions for representing 3D spaces in a Web browser.
The first draft of VRML was based off the Inventor file format developed by Silicon Graphics. This was an established, mature OpenGL toolkit, but it didn't support a lot of interactions that Web designers wanted to offer, like scripted events. So there was still work to be done.
State of the Art
Let's take a second to examine how consumer-grade 3D graphics looked in 1994. It was the very beginning of the video card era, with PCs moving past the VGA palette into plug-in hardware specifically designed to push polygons. Wing Commander III was the new hotness, transitioning from sprite scaling to full 3D models, but even deep space seemed pretty empty. Other home games using 3D environments included System Shock and Marathon.
The most powerful 3D arcade hardware of the day was in Namco's Tekken, a fighting game that animated two human figures and not much else.
Computing power wasn't anywhere near potent enough to render even a static 3D space that looked realistic, let alone across two stereoscopic monitors. So attempting to do that within the confines of a Web browser was a giant leap.
Second Try
The specification continued to evolve over the next few years. In 1995, San Diego hosted a conference where the groundwork of the next iteration was set, featuring competing proposals from Sony and Microsoft. One of the biggest conversations was around making VRML a workable language to construct real-time multi-user worlds. This was the era of Neuromancer, where people really thought that logging on would be tantamount to a whole new existence.
Needless to say, the technology of the era wasn't up to snuff in that department, but the next few years saw a tremendous amount of progress. Wants and needs for this new technology were hashed out and prioritized, and people were very excited.
The VRML 2.0 specification, which added a ton of features and made the language viable for application deployment, arrived in 1997. Virtual browser-based worlds could be built and deployed over the Web. The end results were incredibly primitive, especially by modern standards, but it worked.
The Nitty Gritty
When you look at a VRML file in a text editor, it's pretty simple. A library of pre-understood geometric solids can be drawn at any location, and transforms can be used to change their position and orientation. Drawing a sphere in empty space is as easy as typing:
geometry Sphere {
radius 1
}
You can also attach scripts and traditional Web elements like hyperlinks to these objects. The user-friendliness of the language was on purpose. HTML was intended to be a markup language that was comprehensible to the average user, and the developers of VRML wanted to extend that philosophy. Just like personal Web pages could be built by computer science novices, 3D spaces could as well—in theory. In practice, it wasn't that easy.
The system of transforms used to position and orient objects was a lot to handle for people who hadn't studied trigonometry, which to be fair is most people. Some studios opened up development branches to specialize in VRML, but for the most part it didn't reach the amateur market.
VRML In Action
Not long afterwards, VRML hit the Web hard. It seemed like just about everybody had a 3D website to show off. The initial enthusiasm for this new way of experiencing content was huge. Netscape and Microsoft quickly upgraded their browsers to fully support VRML functionality, and dozens and dozens of 3D websites were launched in between 1997 and 1999. Several companies made consumer-focused virtual worlds; the most notable was CyberTown, which let people from all over the world interact in 3D or 2D space.
It's easy to forget when you've been using the Internet for 20 years; the Web has stayed basically the same, just faster and shinier. But in the early days of networking, nobody had any idea what this thing would become. For many of the brightest lights of VRML, they truly believed that this mode of interaction would subsume and replace Web browsing.
Unfortunately, that didn't happen. After Netscape lost the browser war, Microsoft no longer needed to push for innovation and VRML support was officially dropped, forcing users to install third-party plugins.
Modern Web VR
Even though VRML went out of style not long after its deployment, there are still Web-based tools that let you create 3D worlds in a browser. The biggest advance was transferring VRML data structures over to the XML protocol, creating X3D. Other groups continued to tinker with 3D space in-browser over the years, but soon all of their work would be obsolete.
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The HTML5 specification, released in 2014, added support for the "canvas" object, a free drawing space that could support the creation of objects in both 2D and 3D space. Scalable vector graphics could now be generated without employing an additional markup language or plugin at all.
Thankfully for usability, few people have embraced the "virtual world" as the best mode of Web navigation. It looks like we're going to stick to "pages with words on it" for at least a little while longer. But who knows? As consumer VR becomes more and more popular, we might see a renaissance in Web pages made to be explored goggles-first.