Futurist, Speaker, Inventor, Multiple Award-Winning Author and Podcaster, Educator and Entrepreneur.
Thirty years ago today, in a lecture hall at CERN, on the third and final day of the First International Conference on the World Wide Web (WWW1), I gave a the first public talk about #VRML. Tony Parisi and I had named it "Labyrinth" but when David Raggett had suggested 'Virtual Reality Markup Language' during a 3D BOF at WWW1, I hastily changed all my slides - modifying 'Markup' to 'Modeling'. And we were off and running. The people I met at WWW1 - Brian Behlendorf, Kevin Hughes Gavin M. Doughtie and many others - helped to set VRML on its path to becoming the very first pass at the #Metaverse. https://lnkd.in/gzC6an7R
Brian Behlendorf
1mo
And exactly 30 years later, I'm back in Geneva, this week at the WSIS event hosted by the ITU, making open tech waves again.. Time is a flat circle.
Sandy Ressler
1mo
Amazing hard to believe 30 years!! I remember attending the one in Chicago 6 months later: WWW Fall '94: Mosaic and the Web Chicago, October 17-19, organised by NCSA and CERN. ...and where we presented alternatives to 3D on the Web...more amusing I distinctly remember seeing Marc Andressen and Jim Clark and a few others having lunch..I think they must have been planning the beginning of Netscape (which replace Mosaic the big browser at the time)
Noah Nishihara
1mo
Sony's VRML efforts have really lived on too. Thank you Mr Pesce for replying to my email when I was in high school. But the new developments you pointed me to at the time didn't really get far, and today there are around 1000 or so SAPARi VRML fans on a discord channel you can find online.
Michael Snoswell
1mo
I remember it well - at SGI we picked it up and did a valiant fast run, competing against Apple and others to define a VR/3D standard. The world ended up going a different direction for a few decades, but those were important early days.
Richard Hill
1mo
Yep and the talented group I worked with at Superscape were also working in this direction as well
Gilles Jobin
1mo
In Geneva amazing things can happen! My 4 months CERN artist residency in 2012 was a life changer! Never thought that 20 years later, dancer me would run a full mocap studio for R&D and the performing arts…
David A. Smith
1mo
I think Virus Walkthrough was one of the first, if not the first, exporter into VRML. Fun times.
A fine piece of history that lives on
It's not an understatement to say that the innovation you and Tony Parisi brought to the table changed the course of my life and career. Looking back, the emergence of VRML was one of the most exciting periods in my life and I'm so grateful to you both that I was able to be a small part of it.
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1moWho first decided to pronounce it "vermal"?