Nah, VRML by v2 was pretty complete.

We are literally talking about a kind of amnesia and generational gap in knowledge transfer here. I was there for VRML.

You could almost make a 2022 business model redoing already solved problems and pretending you are inventing new solutions.

Technology doesn’t always linearly progress, sometimes later solutions are technically worse than older ones due to “don’t care” optimization values or lost knowledge or purely social or political reasons. There are also trade offs like portability-performance etc, I’m not denying, but IMO much web “innovation” is useless generational churn and busywork… to say nothing of humans trends and groupthink.

Maybe because the hardware wasn't ready.

Starting fresh could easily be the reason it's failing again because much time is wasted in reinventing the wheel.

The problem is still the use case not the tooling.

One problem is that no format would solve the "who's in the room with you problem". You still need some kind of backend for that.

You could see a future though where you go into one portal and you're in Minecraft, and you go into another and you're playing tennis with your buddy in Europe. Games would just be new portals -- the key here is that it's hosted by different companies, not Meta.

Part of the problem was that I couldn't even get people to dig into the specification.

I came away with the distinct impression that people really don't want to admit that XML is good enough.

Thank Java and overcooked configuration files - everyone hates XML because it did too much for what it was being used for. And yet html is precisely xml, with attached rendering rules and a dialect, but nevertheless it doesn't garner as much hatred as XML.

For complex object description it excels - as anyone who has used a complex UI description language knows, the 'lite' Json, yml, insert hipster conf file format here face a myriad of problems in description that they only somewhat make up for in simplicity.

It is the flaw of misattributation of Occams rule to everything - simplicity is indeed efficient but it cannot account for complexity, and the world ends up a complex place.

And they can't admit that the specification was fine - don't that would force them to effectively admit that there is a very small audience for this.

A little overwrought...

"3d in a browser" sounds like a fairly broad use case. Three.js is fairly popular I hear.

No. It's pure 'not invented here.' If your 3d format can do NURBS it can do anything.

  > If your 3d format can do NURBS it can do anything.

If your 3d format can do NURBS, it can theoretically given unlimited CPU and memory _display_ anything. But that doesn't mean that it can communicate with other devices over the network with low latency. Or can effectively transmit new objects - or people - in your vicinity over the network fast enough to interact with them - especially if arbitrary detail is important, think about a doctor looking into a patient's ear. Or represent moods, emotions, feelings, etc., or even sounds. We don't even know if smells or tastes are next!

Sounds like a solution in search of a problem. But, you're free to add your own extensions on to x3d, if you want to give each part of your sub-assembly a "mood" or "taste" and still have your artifacts be interoperable with the rest of the world.

The 3D format is not responsible for those items. If my proximity to an object triggers things it’s really no different than passing a call to another layer. Think web resources and hyperlink agnosticism

The common piece I see being talked around here is ownership. I bet that, more than anything else, is what drives the pushback. I was there too. People do not want open 3D, because "land grab", next really big, big thing.

"If only WWW would have charged to make a link...."

People have been floating the idea of 'micro-transactions' since the first days of the commercial world-wide-web. People just don't want to do it. There's a reason why average users made the choice to use the wider internet, instead of things like Minitel.

Totally!

But that won't stop developers and founders from doing gatekeeping management math.