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 · 1h 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.
I don't believe it ever had any real uptake. It arguably has (had?) lots of issues.
Keyframe · 3h 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).
https://docs.lume.io/guide/rendering-modes https://threejs.org/docs/#examples/en/renderers/CSS3DRendere...
I don't think either has lighting though! Holy macrel!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML
I wish we had something as easy to deploy interactive experiences on the web like that today.
I don't believe it ever had any real uptake. It arguably has (had?) lots of issues.