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Comment by gtramont | Hacker News Reader

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gtramont

VRML, anyone? :-)

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Already done. Check out a-frame: https://aframe.io/

Bonus points for doing it in Firefox Reality or another VR browser.

Thanks for the link! Seems neat!

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.

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.

Gotta be one of these guys in every one of these threads.

This was meant to be a joke. At the same time, it was meant to foster people's curiosity/education on what our industry has tried before. Sorry if it rubbed you the wrong way, though.

Now an absolute honest question… how long do you think it'll be before we come across something like VRML again?

I’m one of the maintainers of A-Frame (aframe.io). VRML in spirit but with some learned lessons applied. Happy to answer any questions.

Thanks! To be honest, mea culpa, I didn't look anything up before asking that question. Glad I did, though. Care to expand on the lessons learned?

No problem, the question comes often. It’s understandable if you have not kept en eye on the space for a while. A-Frame is built on standards (HTML and WebGL), it runs on any browser without extensions or plugins. But it’s not a standard on itself so it can evolve much quicker and make design decisions based on real world usage by the community. While A-Frame offers high level primitives like `box`, `sphere`, `light`... the emphasis is on extensibility through an entity-component architecture. We aknowledge that A-Frame cannot anticipate all needs for all projects so we wanted to make very easy to extend and reuse 3rd party pieces.

Right, when you make uninformed jokes like this, you trivialize the hard work that others are doing.

This isn't Reddit.

Good point on trivializing other people's work. I can definitely see how it can be interpreted that way. Just to be clear: that was absolutely not my intention. It was more like a "this reminds me of some good old times, does anyone else share the same nostalgia?" type of comment. So, again, sorry if I rubbed you (or anyone else) the wrong way. And I appreciate you taking the time to expand on what I thought was a simple comment.

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