Hacker News Reader

Comment by creativeembassy | Hacker News Reader

Internet Explorer 2, in 1995, had support for VRML. A full 20 years before the Oculus Rift officially launched. I had never heard of that markup language and had to Google it. Talk about being ahead of its time...

View on HN

IIRC around that time, there was VRML porn that could only be viewed with Netscape Navigator, and IE often struggled with this.

Source: A friend of a friend, of course...

The VR hypetrain left the station in the early-mid 90s. There were movies and TV shows about it. VR was going to be the revolution that changed everything -- William Gibson's cyberspace in your living room. But it was all experimental -- big clunky headgear and CPUs and GPUs that were too weak to produce any but a clunky, janky, laggy, polygon-y experience. And most people couldn't afford the fancy gear; for the most part VRML happened on people's monitors.

The recent VR hype happened because with modern PC hardware, the tech finally caught up to sustain an immersive, low-latency experience -- and some very smart dudes had the ambition to make 90s retrofuturism real.

Maybe my filter bubble, but VRML was kind of talked about in the late 90s (when we got on the internet) but the implementation, features, and general application state was more of a running joke. Also that's probably why it faded so relatively quickly, nobody used it.

I remember the most famous techno club from my nearest city used that to provide a virtual room tour on their website. I was too young then to get past the bouncers and liked that feature :)

That's really cool. I honestly don't remember seeing anything besides Hello World examples and they didn't really impress me :|

Oh I remember playing around with some of the 3D chats that came out using that in the late 90s. I was amazed. (A little post-IE2, mind)

Yep. Around that time (1996 I think) I built a prototype UI for doing exploration of a network and its connectivity in VRML.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com