Second Life has got me thinking about VRML. I know it still exists as the Web 3D Consortium. But I remember when it was suppose to be the next big thing. What happened?

Well, back in the day, computers and network connectivity was not as big as today. So interacting or even interacting with a 3D environment was a very low-rez experience. Think just a bit better then Battlezone Yes, there were some dazzling 3D games back then. but those targeted a just-born market of geeks with 3D accelarators (geeks like me who had 2 cards!!!)

And what were the applications of VRML? Sure you could make games and models of live areas, but again, the “online” functionality added nothing to this because, fact is, a local version would run faster. The only real value online brings to the table is the interaction of people with each other. That was the greatest part about MMOGs, making new friends, banding together to slay some baddies, trading items and earning honor for your guild. From what I hear, social interaction also drives Second Life.

Still both games like WoW or City of Heroes, and virtual spaces like Second Life are fixed clients. You play in their sandbox on special servers. It is not as open an environment like the inter-web; that openness allowed the creation of blogs, feeds, and podcasts. If you can hack it, they will come.

But I have been thinking about the rise of AJAX. Like I said before, AJAX is just a new name on technology that has been around for a while. The ability to dynamically change what a browser shows is nothing new, nor is the ability to make a background call to a server. What has really driven it forward is the growth of bandwidth and computational power that everyday people have access to, and the standardization of features across browsers.

Could Google Maps have existed 5 years back? Technically yes. Would anyone have used it? You tell me as you drag that smooth map around as it dynamically preloads the next tile you MAY see.

Now, let us take that growth of computational power and bandwidth and add it to the easy publishing systems of blogs, wikis, torrents, what have you. How hard would it be for someone to create a PHP driven, MySQL supported, 3D world? A place where people can meet up and interact, building and sharing models and scripts to form part of this world? You would have to put some controls on how large models you support and securities on scripts. But apart from that? Sounds conceivable.

Sounds like (yet another) project (I will love to think I will get to, but probably never will)