[thelist] Whatever happened to VRML?

[Naju V]

Or let me make the question more general, what's the current state of 3D
Animation in webpages?

On the VRML situation, all I can remember is reading that the company
working on the Cosmo set of tools for VRML authoring was acquired by Silicon
Graphics and later sold to some other company. Does modern browsers include
the plug-ins for VRML viewing? It's been years since I've come across a
website using VRML. What happened to this technology that was, imho, not
actually awesome but somewhat interesting and promising? I mean, some people
have way more bandwidth and processing power available than they did in
1996. For instance, the renderings, which didn't look very nice and fast on
my 486 might just work in my Celeron at 600 mhz and downloading vrml files
with a cable modem is a totally different thing than doing it at 28.8. What
were the problems with vrml besides the processing and bandwidth issues?

What other options are there available for 3D authoring on webpages? I've
heard that there are some programs in which you can do some modeling and
export the result to flash but how does this work? How affordable are these
tools?

Does 3D in a webpage make any sense to you at all?


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