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. Just like personal Web pages could be built by computer science novices, 3D spaces could as well-in theory. 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. The user-friendliness of the language was on purpose. You can also attach scripts and traditional Web elements like hyperlinks to these objects. Drawing a sphere in empty space is as easy as typing: A library of pre-understood geometric solids can be drawn at any location, and transforms can be used to change their position and orientation. When you look at a VRML file in a text editor (Opens in a new window), it's pretty simple. The end results were incredibly primitive, especially by modern standards, but it worked. Virtual browser-based worlds could be built and deployed over the Web. The VRML 2.0 specification, which added a ton of features and made the language viable for application deployment, arrived in 1997. Wants and needs for this new technology were hashed out and prioritized, and people were very excited. 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. This was the era of Neuromancer, where people really thought that logging on would be tantamount to a whole new existence. One of the biggest conversations was around making VRML a workable language to construct real-time multi-user worlds. In 1995, San Diego hosted a conference where the groundwork of the next iteration was set, featuring competing proposals from Sony and Microsoft. The specification continued to evolve over the next few years. So attempting to do that within the confines of a Web browser was a giant leap. The most powerful 3D arcade hardware of the day was in Namco's Tekken (Opens in a new window), a fighting game that animated two human figures and not much else.Ĭomputing power wasn't anywhere near potent enough to render even a static 3D space that looked realistic, let alone across two stereoscopic monitors. Other home games using 3D environments included System Shock and Marathon. Wing Commander III (Opens in a new window) was the new hotness, transitioning from sprite scaling to full 3D models, but even deep space seemed pretty empty. 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. Let's take a second to examine how consumer-grade 3D graphics looked in 1994. 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. The first draft of VRML was based off the Inventor file format developed by Silicon Graphics. 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. 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. One of those men was Dave Raggett, a leading hand in the development of much of the modern Internet protocol. Computer scientists from all over the world came to Geneva to lay the groundwork for this exciting new medium. The first International Conference on the World Wide Web (Opens in a new window) in 1994 was a pivotal moment in the development of the modern Internet. It was called VRML, and we're going to tell you all about it. A whole markup language was written to turn browsing into a 3D, first-person experience. In the 1990s, despite significantly worse technology, designers tried to make VR games, applications, and even Web pages. If you've spent any time with programs like Tilt Brush (Opens in a new window) you're aware of how neat this stuff is going to get.īut this isn't virtual reality's first rodeo. 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. One of the big tech stories of 2016 was the rebirth of virtual reality.
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