Beginning of the 3D Web? Hardly.
Monday, November 06, 2006, at 04:55PM
By Eric Richardson
It's a trip to read articles today talking about Microsoft's new Virtual Earth 3D.
"What we're announcing is what we believe is the beginning of the 3D Web," said Bobby Figueroa, product management director for Microsoft's Live Local Search.
The re-beginning, maybe, but I remember back to the days of 1998 or so when VRML was all the rage. Heck, it was 1997 when SGI unveiled "Flook", a 3d cartoon that seems to no longer be findable online. I remember SGI's Cosmo Player (also seemingly disappeared in SGI's mind wipe) on both IRIX and Windows. Black Sun Interactive (the makers of "PointWorld", which I think I used to go onto with the hip name "agrosk8er") has since become Blaxxun, but they're still doing multiplayer 3D worlds.
Heck, my time playing with VRML stuff was before I even started blogging, and that was in November of 1998.
I guess all this stuff was just too old to get remembered when it came time for deciding what constituted a "beginning."
Update (10:30): Check out this video newsclip for Flook from 1996.