By bloid
via cafe.elharo.com
Published: Apr 26 2007 / 16:30
Why was VRML an also-ran in the flood of new technologies introduced in the 1990s? It wasn’t fundamentally broken or a bad idea. It wasn’t worse than other technologies of the day like Java 1.0 and Shockwave. It certainly didn’t suffer from a lack of hype, investment, or development resources compared to the winners. VRML fail for one reason and one reason only: it didn’t run on the Mac; and OpenOffice is failing now for the same reason. The problem was all the VRML vendors looked at the Mac’s marginal market share, and decided they couldn’t afford to support it
Comments
Rob Lang replied ago:
This article is interesting, if ultimately, wrong. I'd suggest that a bigger reason that VRML didn't go much further than the academics (of which I was one) into industry (which I am now) was that it was a one trick pony. It did simple 3D environments reasonably well. However, the 90s was a time massive changes in graphics technology - a technology that the browser based VRML could not leverage. There are, no doubt, other reasons but the main reason was not that it was unsupported on the Mac. Sounds like an idealist rant.
greenIridium replied ago:
I agree with all that commented that VRML is not dead. If the author had researched a bit more, he could see that it has evolved to X3D, and still millions of people use VRML today, many apps export to VRML, so it's not dead at all.
Many people use COBOL, which has more than 59 years, and no one says COBOL is dead, because people use it constantly.
We who are in X3D and VRML have to suffer titles like this all time. Sorry but I had to vote down for this. Please stop making polemics on this, you are simply wrong.
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