I've written loads about the history of VR hardware, but not much about the software side of it. The heyday of early VR hype saw a lot of irrational exuberance, and ill advised projects. VRML was among them. Intended to be a 3D extension of HTML that would be just as easy for the average user to understand, there actually was a brief period during which 3D webpages became commonplace.
Seemingly everybody and their dog had a little window embedded in their shitty geocities website where you could wander around a creepily barren, perfectly clean landscape of solid colored geometric shapes, maybe click something to see a hidden animation and sign their guestbook.
It was sort of like the short lived explosion of corporate interest in Second Life, when every major company had a presence there, for a time it seemed as though the future of web browsing would be very much like a videogame. It still sounds cool on paper but most quickly realize what a nightmare that would be for usability.
Something simple like finding a product would take much longer as instead of scrolling through a list, you'd now have to walk through a virtual store to find a polygonal representation of the item you want on the shelf, then bring it to the cashier. Mostly negating the benefits of shopping online in the first place.
Usability comes before 'cool factor' every time. What determines how much something gets used is how fast, convenient and easy it is, not how cool it is. Any UI designer will tell you this. It was a lesson we had to learn the hard and expensive way, however.
Why? Why? Why did so many people want this? 3D graphics were new at the time, and there was an insatiable hunger for them. More 3D, better 3D, even when it made no sense. 2D had just gotten really mature and capable, but it was dogshit in the eyes of consumers.
This was the era during which Sony and Sega both pressured developers to make 3D games and turned down many games for localization if they were 2D. 3D was the shiny new thing and it made us crazy. We snubbed our noses at some of the best games of that generation just because they weren't 3D.
It was fool's gold. 3D just wasn't mature enough to be any good, Quake wasn't even out yet and when it did come out most computers couldn't run it, but we were unwilling to wait. We wanted polygons at any cost. There's a lesson in there someplace but I can't say for sure what it is.
Maybe that newer isn't always better, and that it's a good idea to leave the bun in the oven until it finishes baking before you eat it. That grates on me though as I'm a habitual early adopter and I'd argue early adopters play an important role in financing subsequent revisions of a new technology.
Honestly it was a cool novelty at the time. Seeing a 3D world in a browser window was one of those "woah, I'm living in the future" moments. It just wasn't actually a good idea in practice. Especially with the HMD technology of the day, but I've said plenty about that already and won't rehash it here.
VRML didn't die, exactly. It became X3D. That was only recently superceded when native support for 3D visualization was included in HTML5 without the need for any sort of plugin. Few actually use it, but the capability is there.
The closest thing in the modern day would probably be Janus VR. It's natively VR compatible and although it's basically a ghost town now, it was bustling for a while. There are still loads and loads of really interesting detailed rooms people created in there.
The advanced scripting allows simple games like arena shooters or recreations of classic arcade games in 3D to be made within Janus, and many rooms are 3D recreations of levels from classic games like Earthbound and Cave Story.
I've actually had loads of fun exploring these derelict digital ruins. The 3D interpretations of old 16 bit games in particular. Showing a friend of mine the Janus VR version of Moonside from Earthbound is what convinced him to buy a headset, as he's an Earthbound fanatic.
Still, going between Janus VR and the regular web requires taking off or putting on my HMD. It requires switching from Touch controllers to keyboard and mouse, or the reverse. That's just barely enough hassle that I default to the regular web, just because it's easier.
This is, in a nutshell, why VRML was doomed. Even with the arrival of actual good VR hardware. The metaverse as a concept was really superceded by MMOs, which solve this problem by being their own separate thing with clearly defined goals and professional quality content.
Still, these abandoned prototype virtual worlds hold a strange appeal all their own. Exploring them feels like virtual archaeology, fully explorable time capsules from a formative, transitional era in the development of both 3D graphics and VR.
For that reason, it was a delight to discover that there's a VRML easter egg in the Oculus Rift game Polygon Nightmare. I already posted a let's play of that the other day so if you've seen what normal gameplay is like, skip ahead to 4 minutes 30 seconds to see the secret area, a VRML Aztec temple with various secret messages you can trigger: