1990s VR on the web was such an incredibly utopian vision, it's a real shame we don't have any movement remotely like that today
i feel like a lot of folx don't really understand what VR was like back then, so let me give you some context:
in the early 90s, VR was really hot shit. VPL had invented a bunch of incredible VR technology, including VR surgery, VR musical instruments, VR headsets
and VR data gloves. this was all 1980s tech, it was all very expensive and not available to the average person.
but in the very late 80s and early 90s, we suddenly got a bunch of commercially available, home consumer VR: the Powerglove and Virtual Boy, Sega VR
Virtuality started manufacturing dedicated VR gaming rigs that were basically a new format for the Arcade Machine -- instead of a cabinet with a TV, it was a race car cockpit with a VR headset
you could even go to art shows and computer game arcades in strip malls and play PC games there, some of which were VR games
VR was everywhere and and moving fast. it was clearly the future
in the middle of all of this, the web was emerging on the scene
this was the Old Good Web, not the New Bad Web, back when websites were just a collection of web pages and you could host them in your own home for anyone to visit, without needing a big corporation
the web offered a vision of a new world where anyone could have a kind of virtual existence, and everyone wanted a home page of their own, a place that was theirs to make and remake as they saw fit, and that they could share with others
and right there at the dawn of the web, just a few months before the release of the Netscape browser in October 1994, some smart folx announced the creation of a new technology called Virtual Reality Modelling Language, or VRML
by August 1995, it was demoed at SIGGRAPH, and by October, the beta release of a VRML plugin for Netscape 2.0 was out there. you could buy books on how to program your own VRML "world" as they were called, and embed it directly into your web site like any other part of the site
it was a dream of doing for VR what the web generally was doing for text and images and other content
no company you downloaded the VRML World from, no company to tell you what you could make or who you could share it with
it was a virtual world you controlled on your own site
not only could you create your own virtual home PAGE, you could now make your own virtual home WORLD, another reality that you could invite anyone into
but by 1997 it was clear that the basic VRML model was inadequate
VRML was fairly static. the worlds were full of things, but not much life. richer interactive experiences came not from basic VRML, but the newer VRML2/VRML97 and other more proprietary systems. to make it a true World, you'd have to lock yourself into corporate products
the web just wasn't keeping up with the dream, and so corporations swooped in to fill that void
and because they had more resources to devote to their closed, proprietary experiences, those were much better experiences
multiplayer online video games came to dominate expectations, and the best virtual worlds we got were things like Second Life, which offer only the smallest of versions of the original dream of a world that you could own and control
technology continued to progress, of course, and it's now entirely possible to use completely open standards that are built into almost every web browser to construct complex interactive multi-participant virtual worlds of your own using WebGL, but the dream was dead by 2000
the web was increasingly locked down as the 2000s progressed, you could barely find hosted home page sites like Geocities anymore, and it was increasingly difficult to host your own web site. not impossible, but harder and harder every day
we never properly solved the fundamental problems of the web -- IP addresses constrained home hosting, authoring of virtual experiences is extremely high barrier to entry
even the original VRML-style approach to static VR is functionally dead, despite being rebranded as X3D
you can no longer hand write some simple VR code, toss it up on your home page that you host out of your living room, and have people experience your 3D worlds
you can't even just put VRML into any old webpage now, no matter who hosts it
the utopia of the people's VR is dead
we are, ironically, in a way better position today to achieve that vision. the previously mentioned WebGL just works in any browser now. JavaScript can create interactivity and live connections back to your server. it's almost trivial to get a VPS in place of a home server
but all of the aspects of the early web that drove developers to make things that were supposed to be approachable to people are now gone
there is no push to create new ways to author virtual worlds, to make them compatible with the latest VR technology, etc.
and so the practical barrier creating your own personal virtual worlds is even higher today than it was in 1997 or even 1995. the commitment and technical skill you need today is orders of magnitude more than you needed in the 90s
learning VRML in the 90s was an on ramp to making 3D art, in the same way that HTML and early JavaScript (in the form of DHTML) was an on ramp to programming for a lot of people, and how eventually PHP blog software was an on ramp for folx in the early 2000s
you could just go and do it and it'd be really easy to play with, and even tho it was kinda shit, it worked and it was YOURS
now if you want to get into making interactive worlds in WebGL or other even fancier things, forget it. just become a knowledgable programmer first
the equivalent of Hello World in VRML is a few lines of code, and if you come across something cool on the web, you could always view source and see how it worked and learn from it because it was understandable
the equivalent using WebXR is a ridiculous tangle that you can barely understand even as an experienced programming, unless you go read vast amounts of stuff explaining what all the nonsense does
the reasons are the same as always
the people with resources to make this technology and get it put into browsers are all corporations and their employees, and their efforts are driven by whats good for their business
everything i described above is bad for business. that's why every major tech corporation is a platform for people to use. that's why facebook and twitter and bluesky are central points of control for web presence and interactions
and it infects everything, even personal efforts. tools like React, which are fine tuned for the needs of big corporate web apps, are used for personal sites by random geeks, because they're already familiar with it so its least resistance for them specifically
even things like Mastodon, which seeks to escape the centralized social web tendency, is infected with it, because it was built like any other start up web app from 2014, and has to retain the model of hosting your stuff on other people's computers that you have 0 control over
only the bravest of the brave host their own Mastodon instance, or use the weird Wordpress federation plugins
no 10 year old is going to learn that shit without a lot of effort
but any 10 year old in 1997 could view source and learn and play around with HTML and VRML
@beka_valentine
I've also heard that IPv6 makes home hosting easier, but ISPs are very lazy about supporting it.
Big platforms like Facebook and AWS benefit from the scarcity of addresses of IPv4, and the paranoid me suspects they are in on it.
Also suspicious that ISPs will cancel your account or charge exorbitant rates if you try hosting from home, even if traffic is tiny.
@beka_valentine
And... AI will be a disaster for open source, because you will never write another line of code professionally without a billionaire's permission.
beka valentine
Phosphenes