Whatever Happened to VRML?

Question

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 u

Answer 1

I agree with much of what was posted above. However another problem was that within a very short time most of the tool and viewer developers got bought out by one another, with the eventual result that many tools went away and the leading viewer by far, Cosmo, came under the ownership of Computer Associates, which dropped all support (and even availability for download).

Cortona is still available as a VRML viewer, as are some others.

Adding a bit more to my reply as of 1/13/2014: X3DOM is an initiative to link HTML5 and declarative 3D content using a subset of X3D (the XML-based syntax successor to VRML). It's now usable in many browsers without a plug-in. So, in the words of Monty Python, it's "not dead yet." Also, you'll still see it as a common, standardized import and/or export format, e.g., in Blender. Even Matlab has some support for their simulation environments and to export 3D figures (although when I tried the figure export, the results were pretty bad).