title: Whatever Happened to VRML?
body: <p>Back in the late 1990s, when I was at grad school VRML was going to take over the world. My peers and I built all manner of useful and interesting things with it by hooking it up to Java and Javascript code.</p>
  
  <p>Of course back then computers were many times slower than they are now - multicore CPUs were largely the stuff of science fiction or hush-hush research projects and our VRML applications ran just that little bit too slowly to catch on in the real world.</p>
  
  <p>A decade on, even a cheap PC with a bog-standard GPU would happily run any of our VRML models with ease and possibly might require throttling to ensure they weren't so fast as to be unusable. But the VRML community has died a bit of a death, web-3d hasn't caught on and I can't even find a browser plug-in. X3d was mentioned a while back but that too hasn't caught on.</p>
  
  <p>Does anybody have any ideas what happened? Is there some other 3D web technology I'm not aware of?</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: </p>
  
  <p>For passing historical interest: <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB890154415168357500" rel="nofollow noreferrer">1998 Article on the demise of VRML</a> (The Wall St Journal)</p>