Researching file formats 28: Virtual Reality Modeling Language

This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information.

Update: The official format definition is now online here: Virtual Reality Modeling Language Family. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress.

I was getting so overwhelmed surfing the old web for this format. It was absolutely thrilling but exhausting too, like when you’re on your 13th day of vacation and you’re so worn out but there’s so much more to see. Nothing is more exciting to me than looking into VIRTUAL WORLDS. I felt like it looked like I was having a total manic episode on Mastodon because I kept finding so many things to post. I wasn’t even caffeinated, it was just pure childlike glee.

Some highlights and links:

• One of the leads on this language/format, Mark Pesce, has an extremely trippy website.

• Appreciate Netscape’s collection of Cool Worlds. But if you want just VRML, look no further.

• You’ve gotta check out Floops

• “support for extremely large worlds (we’ve tested worlds up to 12MB)” (source)

• “The viewer for this format should be built into your WWW browser. If you can not view it, your WWW browser is probably installed incorrectly” (source)

• love this 404 page from The Well

• this mesh of a baboon face

• “P.S. If I lost you at the Web, (World Wide Web or WWW) you might try using Mosaic or Netscape to look at one of these: The Web Project page: (URL is http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html)” (source)

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my previous writing on MTV’s Virtual World, Enter the TikkiLand: MTV Spring Break Online