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I spent a good year of my free time in high school creating navigable 3D worlds with VRML. Now it seems like noone has heard of it, and they’re next to impossible to render.

What’s the latest scoop on VRML? I’m curious.

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VRML became X3D, which is still around though not very popular. X3D is pretty much an XML translation of VRML.

There's project called X3DOM that uses JS and WebGL to view X3D models in the browser without a plugin. [https://www.x3dom.org]

I don't think it can view VRML files directly, but there are tools around to convert VRML to X3D.

I was working for a company in 1997 that was convinced VRML was the next big thing. They even spent a fair amount of effort writing their own custom browser plugin to improve performance and add their own extensions to VRML. The whole project folded after only releasing a couple of tech demos.

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