[jandrese]

I remember the VRML player having some weird skewmorphic navigation widget that was incredibly clunky to use. You had to use the mouse to turn virtual wheels to adjust your speed or something, all laid out on a horizontal tube thing at the bottom of the screen.

And this was years after Doom and other 3D shooters introduced wasd movement.

VRMLs biggest problem was that it was just way ahead of its time. Everybody who tried it agreed that 90s PC hardware just wasn't ready for VR, and dialup modems were never going to be adequate. Unfortunately almost everything that has come up to replace it has been proprietary and usually monetized. We've lost that sense of "anybody in the community can be a creator" that defined the early web. It was too hard to monetize.