VRML
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
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)
It seems to me no one wants to actually use existing stuff. People are just having fun reinventing it.
You're right that people want to reinvent it.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
"3d in a browser" sounds like a fairly broad use case. Three.js is fairly popular I hear.
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.
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.
I came away with the distinct impression that people really don't want to admit that XML is good enough.
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.
> If your 3d format can do NURBS it can do anything.
"If only WWW would have charged to make a link...."
But that won't stop developers and founders from doing gatekeeping management math.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
(*) 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
[0]https://www.smg3d.co.uk/design_series/objet260_connex1 [1]https://prostir3d.com/en/equipment/43-photopolymers/multi-ph...
The history of 3D formats is littered with weird stuff that doesn't really describe everything and needs separate texture files and metadata.
Meanwhile other things like text documents have embedded thumbnails and all kinds of stuff.
I'd expect 3D to have multi-material plus texture support(So the same file works in VR and 3DP) by now.
It-just-works
I find 3D much better when sim-racing in VR, for example. Games are more immersive, and even meetings in VR are less fatiguing than via video conference.
I have an old t-shirt around somewhere from a VRML event in the mid-90's (back when I was tinkering on making dumb little scenes a cracked AutoCAD)... yay, it's relevant again :)
Personally, I've felt for a long time that as video cards and GPUs have made rendering a buzzillion polygons per second tenable, operating system developers should rethink their attachment to the two dimensional desktop metaphor that's been the interface for over three decades now. Whenever I suggest this, people tend to knee-jerk on how silly the Jurassic Park scene is with the SGI filesystem navigator (ya, the "It's unix! I know this" scene). Yep, that was the extent of our imagination working within the constraints thirty years ago but I do believe we can and should do better. But I have little confidence in the capacity of Meta or Microsoft to drive that kind of innovation, the creativity and incentives within those organizations will thwart any breakthroughs.
Exceptions are many. I remember seeing Iron Man and being mind blown by the sheer ergonomicity of Stark's hologram interfaces. That's because design and engineering of the kind that Stark does are inherently tactile, he grabs hologramic models of gadgets in his hand and rotates them as if they are really there. That's insanely powerful. Any kind of design, exploratory work, or education where tactile, haptic and even thermo-pressure interfaces are superior to traditional interfaces would vastly benefit from AR and the associated technologies.
Another thing is practical crafts where looking back and forth to a screen is impossible or infeasible, but imagine building a circuit while wearing glasses/contact lens showing a HUD where an annotated schematic of the circuit is displayed, or repairing a car following a graphical step-by-step tutorial (the kind shown in games) overlaid on top of the car, relevant parts of the car glow to get your attention and text appears at exactly the right time to remind you of steps. This is a whole new way of encoding knowledge, YouTube is already a small revolution in the instruction of practical crafts and cooking, imagine how much more of procedural muscle-memory knowledge we can encode with this.
The 2 examples above are just to point out that I'm immensely excited for cheap and ubiquitous VR and AR and I have no shortage of fantasies about them. I'm also not saying that making boring UIs with VR and AR wouldn't make them more entertaining, maybe making tweets float around you would really make Twitter users more amused and engaged (a bad thing), although it adds no real functional value. All I'm saying is that last claim, most current UIs wouldn't benefit substantially from VR and AR except for entertainment value. They wouldn't make it any easier or more efficient on the user. What's Excel with 3D tables? a slightly more confusing Excel.
The real general revolution in UI and interfaces is Neural Interfaces. Even the most basic and primitive neural interface that is basically just a vim-like system for composing a few basic mental gestures into re-bindable commands would be a massive productivity boost, every time you move the mouse or press the keyboard your thoughts start and end before your hands have done anything, imagine the raw speed if your thoughts alone are driving the computer.
Forget graphical tutorials, neural interfaces would conceivably allow us to download mental models and physical skills, Matrix-style. I don't think it would be easy and I'm not even sure it's possible, but boy oh boy, is that a fun thought to imagine. It would obsolete VR and AR entirely because you can just reach into people's brain and plant images, audios, haptic sensations and emotions at will, bypassing the senses and the body completely, and possibly inventing new senses. (e.g. Zap your brain with a certain pattern of electricity representing the earth's magnetic field or the stock market dynamics, after a while it will fade into unconscious and you will have a constant gut feelings for the system that the patterns represent.)
Low level access to neurons will be a gateway to wonders and horrors beyond our imagination.
[1] https://www.roadtovr.com/valve-openbci-immersive-vr-games/
The issue in the parent comment had to do with user interface e.g. for OS - I think the concept is doomed in the general sense - people live in houses, which are mostly reduced to a set of 2d interfaces - having houses in your house is not helpful, its literally just more confusing.
This the general issue - if the assumption is 3D is better than 2D then we should aspire to do everything in 4D, 5D, etc. Apart from obvious physical limitations, there is a good reason we don't do this. Our computer systems already are n-dimensional - dimensions are useful for storing complexity. We crave simplicity, though, this is why 2D is so popular, we reduce complex n-dimensional models to 2 dimensional ones.
As programmers, we even reduce it to a single, textual dimension - being able to follow a single thread is often all we can easily reason about. Many, many people prefer reading or listening to audio over watching pictures - TV shows can be nice to veg out to, but they are much harder and more complex to dig into and really engage with.
That's why there is no good use case for a 3D OS shell, for the majority of people it doesn't provide adequate visualization value for the added complexity. To a systems engineer, there could be some value in viewing OS components as parts of a car engine, perhaps, indeed a lot of useful tooling seeks to visualize this type as stuff as much as possible. But your average Joe just needs email and maybe pictures and video - sticking them in a 3D environment just makes them more difficult to use.
The dismissal of 3d as interface for applications and data is emblematic of the absence of creativity cited in my original comment. Yes, we're accustomed to navigating folder hierarchies and invoking discrete functionality but outside of that paradigm data can be organized and retrieved more effectively. IOW, when presented with steam and internal combustion capabilities all you still want is a faster horse it's a lapse of the imagination.
As a young teenager, I used to obsess over fighter planes. Then I stumbled upon the weapons & equipment pages on Federation of American Scientists (FAS) website. See [1] as an example. They had WRL files (a VRML format) for most planes in their inventory.
15 years ago that was cool.
It seemed normal back then, but looking back it is unbelievable how smooth the whole experience was given the state of the internet in 2001.
Edit: Wow, the site still exists! http://www.parallelgraphics.com/vrml/mir2/
"Each scene is 100KB in size. It may take up to a minute for the scene to load, so please be patient."
No recommendations on what is supported though. I'm guessing best viewed in IE at 800x600
I don't know what someone operating at a more expert level would have been able to do; I was entirely self-educated in everything about browsers and had no peers to learn from. As it was, it was an exercise in frustration that was mostly shown at one trade show and then better forgotten.
Java Applets did exist. I think you could do 3D[0] at that time. But given that you were working with a CAD app you were almost certainly dealing with a legacy C/C++ and OpenGL codebase. There was no way to get that into a JVM in 2003 and you would either be rewriting your whole app to fit into a browser, or doing some weird server/client thing where your app just sends bits of Java to run in the browser.
The preferred way to get 2D vectors in a browser in 2003 actually wasn't SVG, though - the go-to was Flash. You absolutely could have written a bunch of ActionScript to drive a user interface and draw out vector graphics. But it couldn't do 3D until way later[1]. Also, the file formats involved were extremely proprietary; the only way to generate SWFs dynamically was to wait a year and pay exorbitant sums for Macromedia Flex.
Director and Shockwave were roughly the same thing as Flash but bigger. Notably it had support for native plugins for itself, called Xtras, which could run in the browser. So if you were really, really willing to get invested in the Macromedia ecosystem you could write your own 3D plugin for Shockwave[2].
Of course at that point if your CAD app had any amount of Windows support, then the easiest way to proceed would be to just ship an ActiveX control with your app in it. ActiveX was literally just COM/OLE, but on the web[3]. Assuming, again, that you already had a native app; this would have been the way to go in 2003. A lot of Windows developers handled web integration by just punting to ActiveX. It pissed people like me off, but it worked well enough.
[0] Related note: This is actually how Minecraft started.
[1] By the time it had both 3D and native code cross-compiling, Adobe had this hare-brained scheme to charge a revshare for using both features at once, which singlehandedly pissed off their remaining users and killed the platform faster than you can say "Thoughts on Flash".
[2] Fun fact: a company called The Groove Alliance actually did that; it was called 3D Groove SX. They then realized this was silly and wrote their own standalone ActiveX control called 3D Groove GX.
[3] ...without any sandboxing
For context, the video by Lazy Game Reviews today showed some early snippets of Windows 95 VRML left on an old VAIO laptop: https://youtu.be/wPVIubVtdRY?t=1693
This video was the first I’d heard of the format, so it doesn’t surprise me to see others giving it a search and further share here on HN.
It actually has an active fan community believe it or not.
I remember they had VRML to WWW hooks, and navigating that would take you from one VRML world to another VRML on the web kind of like a portal. It was a fascinating way to visualize the web (kinda like an open Metaverse) and I'd like to see a return to that so that one company doesn't rule the Metaverse.
It was a nice toy but rely useless at that time,and a resource hog for computers of that moment. Still a fun project.
> Every time VRML practitioners approach the problem of how to represent space on the screen, they have no focused reason to make any particular trade-off of detail versus rendering speed, or making objects versus making spaces, because VRML isn't for anything except itself. Many times, having a particular, near-term need to solve brings a project's virtues into sharp focus, and gives it enough clarity to live on its own.
>
> Clay Shirky
One of the most common annoying question lots of people asked Mark at the time was "How does VRML relate to XML?" to which the annoying answer was "it doesn't".
All that relentless XML badgering from XML drones eventually drove Mark to the point of publishing a vitriolic anti-XML diatribe in high dudgeon, based on the premise that Microsoft was going in whole hog on XML, therefore XML was Evil, because Microsoft is Evil, so you shouldn't use XML, because Microsoft ruined XML, and you should use VRML, because VRML doesn't use XML, which is the great thing about VRML.
Might as well combine the anti-Microsoft fervor with the anti-XML backlash of the times to promote VRML.
XML certainly is evil, but not because of Microsoft supporting it!
This annoying misconception about VRML using XML may be why they eventually retronymed VRML from "Virtual Reality Markup Language" to "Virtual Reality Modeling Language" at one point. (YAML went through the same "oops" realization).
He also wrote another epic diatribe dramatically comparing himself and the VRML inner cabal to the true elder gods of old mythology, who after creating the universe and starting it going, were finally going to step aside and let the new kingdom of mankind and their lesser imaginary gods take over their own fate and bla bla bla...
I haven't been able to dig up any archives of whatever mailing list I read that stuff on, but if anybody has some of the old school vrml mailing list archives sitting around, I'd love to have a link or a copy -- it was terrific entertainment!
My Life as the VRML Poster Child
VRML - It's Neat!
The Utterly Exhaustive VRML Bible
>Quake does something well instead of many things poorly...The VRML community has failed to come up with anything this compelling -- not despite the community's best intentions, but because of them.
I can definitely see parallels between the situation today, where depsite failed attempts at a rebrand of virtual worlds as the "metaverse", the closest to a success in establishing virtual worlds is kids playing in Minecraft and Fortnite.
I wonder if other than gaming and "hanging out" there would be any practical applications. Modeling probably.
As an adult I have never been able to find any information about this :(
Was VRML cool? Yes! Was it clunky? Yes. VRML had all the finesse of XML, but it worked. If you could think in 3D, you could create items fairly easily in VRML. On a Windows 95 machine (good heavens!) using Netscape with a plug-in, moving through a VRML world was not fast or smooth, but it was doable. I created a 3D version of my office to show my managers what was possible, and discussed how we might actually do some things with it.
Yes there are posts here indicating VRML is being used today. For all practical purposes however, it's dead and has been for a quarter century.
[edit] I came back thinking, "We have got to take advantage of this." For a little while, there was an effort. The bigger players got involved, 'standards' started shifting, and the realities of our business network sunk in. Sigh.
The world these days does look quite a bit different than it did in the 1990's... and yet some things aren't.
Interestingly, Meta's CTO just let slip yesterday about a web version of Horizon:
https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/14/23025899/meta-horizon-wor...
On the other hand, projects like Croquet/Qwak/Cobalt have been open-source for over a decade; are federated/P2P; already have "hyperlink portals" like parent commented; support existing standards like XMPP, VNC, etc.; have been ported to Javascript; etc. And yet, they seem effectively dead :(
That's opensimulator
The server software remains closed source. OpenSim [1], a community-driven reimplementation with federation support, has been around for a while but as you say hasn't really gone anywhere since the original wave of metaverse hype died down.
Both of which are really symptoms of the same overall problem, being unfriendly to new users.
But even the "free version" of SL has minimal traffic: https://opensimworld.com/
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Grid_List
OsGrid alone has 4600 regions.
It's a true federated system; you can run your own server, you can have portals to other servers, and, for grids which sell things, there are competing payment rails.
Open Simulator has a lot of spaces, but not that many users. Like most federated systems, it's a niche. Works OK, hard to use, few are interested.
Second Life continues to plug along. Right now, 50,844 users are in world. Which is more than any non-game metaverse. (Not sure about Meta; they don't give out numbers, but 20,000 has been mentioned.) MMO games are far bigger; check Steamcharts. The top games are in the millions.
Don't believe any number about a virtual world you can't check from the outside. Concurrent users right now is usually the only honest number. There are systems which claim huge numbers of users, but their definition of "user" is "they, or some bot, put an email into the signup form."
The "metaverse" hype has produced a bit of growth, as people find out that most of the hyped systems are either nonexistent or very low rez. Usage is very low. Decentraland is around 1000-2000 concurrent users. They got up to 2600 once. Cryptovoxels is smaller. So is Sandbox. Sominium Space is in single digits.
Most people these days run their own grid through the dreamgrid installer. that actually increases fragmentation
and then the testing grid , osgrid, is down for multiple days every few weeks, which alienates and frustrates new users . overall activity is down, despite the pandemic. and my experience is that it's very very hard to keep users interested because it is lacking the critical mass of people. It also suffers from very high levels of drama
i find it very hard to believe that decentraland will keep such high numbers for long, it has received enormous coverage in the media eventhough it's bordeline a scam (imho). opensimulator has not received any of this
I dont think metaverses should be compared with mmo games - they are different things and attract nonoverlapping crowds.
There seems like such an assumption that everybody is aching to decorate new spaces and show off for its own purpose. How often do you visit a space just to check out the space, versus to do something in it? And that's especially true when pushed now by companies thinking it's monetizable, where now you've lost the benefit of not being constrained by real estate and physical material prices. So you've got advantages over video calls for keeping up with people far away, but what else?
And then one day Google will create little info cards that are snippets of the recipe VR sites. You'll still have to swoop and fly your way there but it'll be a smaller space.
Something similar to that is A-Frame VR which is built on WebVR.
There used to be a way with at least one VR-enabled browser to navigate without exiting VR (if the other site supported VR). Not sure any still support it. I think this may be because it goes against walled-gardens interests. https://github.com/immersive-web/navigation#api-proposal
Now when I look at a-frame, i see them just reinventing a square wheel. "Oh, it is like vrml, just worse in every way..?". Sigh. Nowadays, i prototype in roblox instead, but its not the same.
I never ran across this delightful Wired article about all that stuff until today:
https://www.wired.com/1995/07/technopagans/
>Wired Magazine: Jul 1, 1995 12:00 PM: Technopagans, by Erik Davis
>May the astral plane be reborn in cyberspace
>"Without the sacred there is no differentiation in space. If we are about to enter cyberspace, the first thing we have to do is plant the divine in it."
>-Mark Pesce
>Mark Pesce is in all ways Wired. Intensely animated and severely caffeinated, with a shaved scalp and thick black glasses, he looks every bit the hip Bay Area technonerd. Having worked in communications for more than a decade, Pesce read William Gibson's breathtaking description of cyberspace as a call to arms, and he's spent the last handful of years bringing Neuromancer's consensual hallucination to life - concocting network technologies, inventing virtual reality gadgets, tweaking the World Wide Web. Long driven to hypermedia environments, the MIT dropout has now designed a way to "perceptualize the Internet" by transforming the Web into a three-dimensional realm navigable by our budding virtual bodies.
>Pesce is also a technopagan, a participant in a small but vital subculture of digital savants who keep one foot in the emerging technosphere and one foot in the wild and woolly world of Paganism. Several decades old, Paganism is an anarchic, earthy, celebratory spiritual movement that attempts to reboot the magic, myths, and gods of Europe's pre-Christian people. Pagans come in many flavors - goddess-worshippers, ceremonial magicians, witches, Radical Fairies. Though hard figures are difficult to find, estimates generally peg their numbers in the US at 100,000 to 300,000. They are almost exclusively white folks drawn from bohemian and middle-class enclaves.
[...]
A good example is 3d tiles specification [3][4] which is fast becoming a default for web and is basically gltf wrapped in json.
[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=x3d,gltf
[1] https://realism.com/blog/gltf-x3d-comparison
[2] https://www.web3d.org/blog-integrating-x3d-and-gltf
[3] https://docs.opengeospatial.org/cs/18-053r2/18-053r2.html
[4] https://github.com/CesiumGS/3d-tiles/tree/main/specification
Start with VRML-97's syntax, add a bunch of unnecessary quotes and colons, remove useful stuff like DEF/USE, and voila! you have glTF.
At least it's not X3D.
I always considered the successor to be SecondLife. I guess the Metaverse is trying to be the successor to SecondLife, but I think they're trying to solve the wrong problems with it and are not likely to be successful.
Games have done Metaverse like 3D multiplayer environments for years now, but always combined with gameplay or construction elements. I don’t really see the point of going to a 3D chat environment if there are no work/entertainment benefits in them that are clearly superior in 3D.
I especially loved the Level-Of-Detail object that allows to design different objects depending on the distance of the object with the view point.
I still have the files somewhere, but last time I checked, I found no software to read them.
...and graphviz can produce VRML...
Lots of other garbage tweets in the mix, sorry: https://twitter.com/search?q=(from%3Aschmichael)%20until%3A2...
20 years later we're finally somewhat there with VR Chat and Horizon.
https://www.khronos.org/openxr/ => static const XrDebugUtilsMessageTypeFlagsEXT XR_DEBUG_UTILS_MESSAGE_TYPE_CONFORMANCE_BIT_EXT = 0x00000008;
This is conceptually on the other end of VRML and it's not clear if 3D rendering in the browser is even one of its goals
All that knowledge is just sitting there waiting for the day when its needed again. Any day now.
My biggest learning was how loading/rendering times impact overall user experience.
My second biggest learning was in how quickly a new tech can completely vanish and take all your work with it.
I am so looking forward to doing projects with WebGL.
I had all sorts of complaints around what VRML couldn’t do at that time, particularly how you’d inevitably get your back turned to what you were supposed to look at, have a hard time turning around, and the people developing the world don’t care.
Looking back with insight from ‘the metaverse’ I see the problem as a lack of storytelling or the facilities for storytelling.
The idea that you’re going to bum around in some virtual world and indulge your narcissism in parallel to how you indulge your narcissism in the real world still appeals to those who want to subject us to ‘experiences’ even if it doesn’t for end users.
I started studying theme park design a few months back because I was interested in seducing people (which you could win at 100% of the time if you had 100% control of the environment.) The metaverse fad came up and it gave me a good mental model of what’s missing in the metaverse…. Storytelling!
Many people in 2022 are inclined to accept you can have fiction without storytelling because we’re so used to fiction that is driven by characters and setting (say Star Wars or My Little Pony Friendship is Magic). Somebody even pointed out to be that those Victorian novels I couldn’t stand in high school were part of this trend.
Some point people will realize that ‘the line is going up’ (NFTs) isn’t a good enough story but until VR designers adopt storytelling ideas from theme parks people will be snoozing.
Videogames call this "environmental storytelling" and it's a really solid way of constructing a narrative in such spaces. The reason why the current or prior generations of "metaverse" technologies don't do this is because they're not trying to be a narrative work. They're trying to be "HTTP for 3D worlds" - in other words, hoping someone else will come in and build the narrative on top of their platform so they can charge the creators a fee to publish their own work.
If I was going to use the metaverse, I'd want to have a button "New world" that would essentially create a whole new world similar to decentraland, where I could choose the size of this world.
None of the metaverse platforms allow you to create your own world, your own 3d website. Instead they try to cram you into their world, which is made to be pretty small on purpose to keep "land" prices high.
A run-of-the-mill game like Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet has meaningful interactions with NPC characters that are NPC characters in the game. Mario and Luigi: Dream Team has NPC crowds that shower you with admiration.
Capital One (Progressive Insurance, AT&T, ...) establishes an emotional connection with me through actors who plays characters on television commercials, operating themed stores, etc.
They aren't going to move to the metaverse until they can give an experience at that level.
Single player video games succeed at this.
Fiction (Sword Art Online, Ready Player One, The Matrix, Disneyland) tells us clearly what the metaverse is: you share the space with players and NPCs.
The will has to be there but the technology isn't ready yet.
NPC characters are almost always a handful of specific text lines, triggers, and flags cobbled together into something that's "interactable" only within the limited confines of that specific game. The NPC will not work outside of that specific game scenario, and often can be broken within that context.
Furthermore, a huge chunk of the effort to make a good single-player game is specifically the scenario and NPC design, which as mentioned above only works in the context of the other. None of this cost is being accounted for in any of the plans people have for "the metaverse". At best, there's handwaving about running a platform where players sell each other paid mods for an existing game. This is not an adequate system for funding the creation of worlds and items, IMO.
The people pushing for metaverse want something that isn't a videogame, but is wearing the skin of a videogame.
It was multi-user, it had a wide variety of customizable avatars that could express emotion and featured lip synching to the user's mic audio, it had 3D spatial user and environmental audio, and it all worked really well over dialup (even with 28.8kbps) even on first generation Pentium PCs. Movement was done with "FPS"-style keys (cursors, ALT for strafing, etc.). MTV would host regular live events in-world and there were a number of other large companies that were involved as well.
here's fun blog piece about the launch of sgi's webforce content creation suite which included tools for vrml.