"Ahead of the times" strikes again

[jducoeur]

Check out Google's latest venture: Lively is an immersive virtual world, kind of like Second Life, but browser-based and (I gather) trying to integrate more with the Web.

At a quick glance, it looks moderately close to what we were trying to do at Trenza, and perhaps even closer to my original goals when the VRML project started up back in 1994. (Although I doubt they've adopted the Portals mechanism that I've always wanted for navigating around.) Glad to see it actually happening, and slightly boggled that it's taken this long...

Comments

[jducoeur]

Yeah -- I joined the VRML project about two days after it started, and was pretty active for the first year or two. Mark Pesche (sp? that doesn't feel right) and I had an ongoing polite argument in that period, about how the large-scale "world" should be constructed. He was propounding the relatively organized and formal Cyberspace Protocol, I the more chaotic and fluid Portals model. Almost nobody listened to either of us, which I believe is the main reason VRML never proved very useful or interesting.

I have three claims to fame WRT VRML:

1) I named the language. (The initials came before me, but I was the one who pointed out that having them stand for "Virtual Reality Markup Language" was silly, and suggested the change to "Modeling" instead.)

2) I came up with the Portals model, which got implemented by one or two minor companies, and *may* have accidentally influenced the path of rendering tech over the subsequent years. (I like to think that the game Portal is a distant descendant of my ideas, although it's hard to be sure.)

3) I conducted the survey that led to the decision to adopt Inventor as the base language underlying VRML. (Which, in retrospect, was probably a mistake, but hindsight is 20/20.)

I also wrote what may have been the first description of VRML in print -- a chapter in the partially-Carolingian-authored Special Edition Using Java -- although there may well have been others before then.

I remember many of us were trying to use Black Sun as a model.

People are generally shocked to learn that I *still* haven't read the book. I just arrived at somewhat the same place independently. I suspect that my lack of Snow Crash background is part of why I came up with Portals -- I didn't share the common assumption about what the "world" looked like, and so came at it from a very different direction...

[oakleaf-mirror.livejournal.com]

“Mark Pesche (sp? that doesn't feel right)”

It's Mark Pesce. I met him in Grade 7, and we were in school together through High School. I mostly lost touch with him after that, except for snippets I hear from mutual acquaintances.

[bkdelong.livejournal.com]

Yes, sorry. Blackberry limitations. Mark Pesce (http://markpesce.com/).

My only VRML claim to fame (if you could called it that for a freshman in college) was trying to get the right name for comp.*.vrml newsgroups decided and voted on (http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-vrml.1995q2/0518.html). I can't even remember how it all finished out....it was an excellent lesson in Net politics, however. ;)

[jducoeur]

Ah -- yes, sympathies. We went through that for rec.org.sca back in the late 80s. (Early 90s? Somewhere in there, anyway...)