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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Surprisingly little previous discussion:

VRML was a standard in 1995 but now everyone's excited about The Metaverse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29237519 - Nov 2021 (4 comments)

Ask HN: Is VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) Relevant to Metaverse? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29111474 - Nov 2021 (2 comments)

VRML – Virtual Reality Markup Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29046541 - Oct 2021 (3 comments)

VRML (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28374558 - Aug 2021 (1 comment)

A free Java VRML Viewer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24805346 - Oct 2020 (1 comment)

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One of those is my submission. I posted it in response to all the buzz over figuring out VR markup.

It seems to me no one wants to actually use existing stuff. People are just having fun reinventing it.

During my limited time at FRL (i.e. Meta), I tried to be a proponent of X3D (successor of VRML), and the push back I got was tremendous.

You're right that people want to reinvent it.

Well, thanks for fighting for standards adoption, even if it didn't work out. It's always good to have interoperability represented on the inside.

how did that pushback look like? to old? failed technology?

i saw a lot of excitement around VRML at the university in the late 90s.

the problem was that average computers just didn't have the capacity for 3d rendering back then. at the university we had high end SGI workstations, and of course these were used for impressive demonstrations of what VRML could do. but i guess because noone outside had computers capable enough it didn't catch on.

the current generation is not aware of what we did back then and may not realize that lack of performance was the primary problem we were facing.

There's a bunch I can't really say, but I think a bunch of forms from bad incentives which don't align to any long term goals.

My opinion is that the key idea of the metaverse definitely requires a standard like HTML which people can just hack on with text files. X3D is the closest in my opinion of achieving that, and I argued we should make X3D a first class citizen to overcome performance challenges of the browser/device.

Even today, pick whatever web framework, and it just boils down to HTML. There really should be a common 3D substrate that is that easy.

Gamers often bought 3D cards for PCs by the late nineties.

Let’s stipulate for the purpose of this discussion that VRML is satisfactory, though IIRC it isn’t for various reasons. The real problem in the 90’s and today is that we haven’t figured out user interface hardware that people can/want to actually use for extended periods of time.

Even today, literally every player in this space thinks it’s going to be a head mounted display/goggles/glasses. Until someone produces 3D/holo displays that don’t require gadgets affixed to your head and body in one way or another, I think AR/VR is going to be a failure for general consumer use no matter how slick the underlying rendering technology.

Edited to add: something like Tilt5 where it’s very inexpensive and you aren’t expected to wear the device forever might be an exception.

i agree that VR is still far away from taking off.

i expect the solution is going to be something like CAVE, which we already had working in the 90s. by today it is feasible to have a 4-sided projector mounted in a room so that you can project a 3d environment to multiple walls and give you the feeling of being inside. 3D glasses like those used in movies today are light enough to help with the 3D effects too.

but VRML wasn't just for VR. we are playing 3D games without VR for quite some time now, and there is no reason we couldn't use VRML or X3D today to create interesting experiences.

in the end it comes down to how easy it is to create and distribute the content.

what we need is another drive into browser support where we can embed a 3D object easily, and then maybe it will catch on.

>> people want to reinvent it.

Maybe with good reason: If it didn't take off last time maybe there are hidden stumbling block in the specification. Trying fresh might unconsciously bring the right ingredients this time. There is the faint possibility that specification and implementations were correct, just too far ahead of its time and infrastructure; it's usually worth taking this risk though. And of cause reinventing means owning and deeply understanding.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

I'm guessing that since this is a text-based markup language, a lot of people wanted a format that had a lot less friction in a compute-constrained mobile environment, preferably something that can be piped straight to a GPU.

HTML is fine for the browser because it is mostly delivering text and JS, which are both processed in a CPU. Text files are inherently GPU-hostile, and that makes them a weird choice for a graphical markup language.

> Text files are inherently GPU-hostile, and that makes them a weird choice for a graphical markup language.

The point of a standard is to be device agnostic. Tying it to present-day technical implementations would limit its adaptability to future tools, as well as creative misuse of the technology.

Then why tie the format to present-day technical tools like text editors? Why not invest in a format that makes sense and the tools to understand and work with it?

Also, GPUs and their architecture aren't a fad, they have been the same for the last 30 years. If you want your format to be truly device agnostic, text is a bad format because it precludes many types of devices (GPUs and hardware accelerators) from being able to use it.

Text had been then same for the past 5000 years or so, predating text editors by an enormous margin.

How are text files gpu hostile?

Text files are very hard to efficiently parse in parallel because there are so many variable-length and conditionally present fields. That necessarily leads to branches in your code which GPUs are not designed for.

It depends on the format of the text, the parser for that format, the language of the parser, and many other factors. Such a broad affirmative statement that text files are inefficient is tenuous at best.

Then pad fields and require them, even if the value is Null/None/Nil, and the field names too.

  USERNAME:dotancohen\0\0\0\0\0\0
  FOOBAR\0\0:\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0

This might look ugly if you open it in Notepad, but so do XML and Org mode files. However an Emacs/VIM/VsCode plugin could make this seamless for the user.

They might not look as pleasant as Markdown, but Org mode files still look good in a plain text editor like Notepad.

We need some technology that turns text files into binary. To the startupmobile!

Hmm sounds like a compiler

As far as i know HTML and JS are also text formats which must be interpreted. So i do not see any advantage between parsing a text format or HTML or JS.

Reuse requires reading. I always figured Meta for a wheel reinventor. I always ignore their reach outs.

Not 3d, but a big percentage of my career has been in platform groups and leadership, and it still surprises me that most people who are drawn to this type of work seemingly only do so to make a platform or standard from scratch, not actually to align around existing shared solutions.

VRML is a relic from the 90s. Complaining that nobody wants to use it now for modern VR is like complaining that Netflix doesn't use MPEG1. Netflix is just having fun reinventing video compression!

And the reason VRML even exists is that somebody just wanted to have fun reinventing 3D graphics in the 90's, so it doesn't deserve to be used just for the sake of not reinventing the wheel. It's an old shitty wheel that was a reinvention of another invention(*), done just to be fun to implement, but not fun to use.

(*) It's funny because it's true that VRML is literally a reinvention of Inventor, and Open Inventor is a reinvention of VRML.

http://www.verycomputer.com/288_b61771df97de6635_1.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML#Standardization

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Inventor

You realize that h.264 was started in the 90s, right?

What's that got to do with anything?

The video compression that Netflix did not invent is h.264 that was invented in the 90s. Just like VRML.

I wasn't saying that everything invented in the 90s is now a relic. Lots of technology from then has stood the test of time and is still useful. But VRML is not one of them! It wasn't any good even at the time.

All this Metaverse buzz also reminds me of SecondLife[1][2] which was quite popular for a short period of time, then quickly vanished from horizon.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life

[2] https://secondlife.com/

Exactly my thoughts. They even had their own currency, Linden Dollars!

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