Fact Check: "Primitives" Preceded Second Life With VRML from the 90s!

Important fact check from longtime reader Joey1058, on my rant about Zuckerberg talking about adding "primitives" to Horizon Worlds, a term I suspected he lifted wholesale from Second Life:

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but 'primitives' isn't new to SL either. We'd been using prims in VRML for half a dozen years before SL left the lab.

Joey is right -- pictured above are primitives from VRML, the early 3D web coding language from the 90s, as noted here:

The Primitives on Pedestals scene highlights the geometry primitives, placing each one above a Gothic pedestal. Of note is that the pedestal itself is built using only the geometry primitive nodes.

Credited to David R. Nadeau, you can actually interact with these primitives here on VRML's web3d.org site. I've updated the original post to reflect this!

By the way, the first attempts to build the Metaverse were on VRML, including "CyberTown" from Blaxxun Software, named after the Black Sun night club in Snow Crash. Interestingly (as a visit to the Wikipedia page attests), we were having the same arguments back then, often with the same people:

In a March 1998 ACM essay, "Playfulness in 3D Spaces -- Why Quake is better than VRML, and what it means for software design", Clay Shirky sharply criticized VRML as a "technology in search of a problem", whereas "Quake does something well instead of many things poorly...The VRML community has failed to come up with anything this compelling -- not despite the community's best intentions, but because of them. Every time VRML practitioners approach the problem of how to represent space on the screen, they have no focused reason to make any particular trade-off of detail versus rendering speed, or making objects versus making spaces, because VRML isn't for anything except itself.

Clay Shirky, of course, wrote the famous essay puncturing the Second Life hype wave of 2005-2010, while Quake was lead developed by John Carmack, who went on to be Oculus VR's CTO, working directly... for Mark Zuckerberg.

Comments

[Martin K.]

A quick search for "geometric primitive" on Google scholar returned this reference from 1978: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/800248.807384 , but I'm sure one can find even earlier references using the term with a bit more digging.

[Thorus Vanalten]

"By the way, the first attempts to build the Metaverse were on VRML, including "CyberTown" from Blaxxun Software, named after the Black Sun night club in Snow Crash."

Yes, and btw those VRML worlds were horrible =)

In fact, the first virtual world done in VRML was Worlds.com, or Worlds Chat in 1994, and did I already mention it was horrible? So was Blaxxun.

But the very first attempt on building the metaverse as described in Neal Stephenson's novel "Snow Crash" (1992) was done in Renderware and still is, and its called "Active Worlds"(AW), founded in 1995, because Renderware was a way much better engine (also later used for example in the first 3D version of GTA)

AW started after the two developers had read the novel and told each other: "Lets do this".

While "Alphaworld" as the biggest and oldest world (and also worlds hub) is their very own approach on how a virtual 3D www would look and feel and work like, COFmeta or "Metatropolis" is one of the earliest worlds within the web of worlds of AW which was opened in 1996.

And COFmeta is an homage to the very Metaverse Stephenson described in his novel and for example features "The Street" as well as the "Black Sun lounge".

I visited the early Second Life from 2000 to 2002, when it was just two sims, one public and one closed one.

And in my experience Second Life was an attempt by to make their own AW.

And while you were mentioning Blaxxun: the company was founded in 1995, right, but the first product you could use besides some kind of Quake-like shooter in a web browser (it was even more like a beta) was in 1998 after they bought that community site "Cybertown" and converted it into a 3d web space.
I know because it was in fact a German company (I am German,too) and I worked with them on some projects as an advisor.

And please dont fall for "the millions of registered users" mentioned in the Wikipedia article: they registered and after some minutes they never came back.

For example you and I remember the hype of Second Life in 2006 and 2007 when users registered and even logged in for the 1st time, then were asking those helpful Greeters two things: "What shall I do now" and "How do I earn money" and were overwhelmed by the possibilities on the one hand and on the other hand totally underestimated the levels of skills needed to really make a living from "playing" Second Life - but thats what every new article on Second Life was referring to: its a game, and you can make money from playing it.

Also think of the hardware and bandwith and the costs of having both in the mid-90s and end of the 90s: this was mostly still only available at very high costs so the users were mostly enthusiastic geeks with money or people using their employers work equipment in the office,

I personally did the first live interactive "Let's Plays" streams in late 1999 when DSL was introduced in Germany and other parts of Europe on the first German "Internet TV station", and the above may pretty accurate describe our audiencce ;D

Best you could get as a viewer (and chatter) was a 400k fullscreen video stream accompanied by an ICQ chat for a 24/7 full live program with all sorts of different shows and news, very much like Twitch or a Youtube or Tiktok live stream today, done on the new Windows Media Player also introduced in 1999.

And by then I also introduced various 3D environments built in "AW" to accompany several shows that were broadcasted, like for example a "Pager Corner" accompanying a Dating Show, presenting profile pics of people interested in dating, with a catch phrase and their pager number, not only "open" during the very time of the Dating Show but of course always .. and I would honestly argue that all of those different spaces and even whole worlds for that internet TV station had more visitors in one year than Blaxxun had ever in their 3 years with "Cybertown".