jayknight 7 hours ago

I remember the promise of VRML, but never had a machine powerful enough to render anything but the simplest examples.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML

  • Keyframe 5 hours ago

    I worked on SGI machines at the time and even that wasn't powerful enough. Even though Indy was dubbed as "the web machine" (I worked on Indigo2). It was a bit too early when it was promised.

  • doawoo 3 hours ago

    wild that I booted up my SGI O2 the other night just to remember the name of the tech used in the demos that ran inside Netscape! And then spent a whole while reading about VRML.

    I wish we had something as easy to deploy interactive experiences on the web like that today.

  • socalgal2 3 hours ago

    the VRML people migrated to X3D https://webx3d.org/

    I don't believe it ever had any real uptake. It arguably has (had?) lots of issues.

Keyframe 5 hours ago

My guy here did what Sega Saturn's VDP1 did. Instead of triangle based rendering, which most did, Saturn used quads, or "distorted sprites" to do 3D. Trivia: Nvidia's first accelerator NV1 was based on what VDP1 did and also used quads and failed on the market (mostly due to it).