In 1995, putting a three-dimensional world on a webpage was sufficiently strange that building a virtual gallery with doors between rooms counted as a useful technical experiment.
Visit Grafman’s VR World demo guide
Robert M. Free’s surviving Grafman’s VR World pages are a compact record of the period when VRML — the Virtual Reality Modeling Language — looked like one possible future of the Web.
The demo guide is especially good because it does not merely preserve screenshots. It dates the experiments, explains what each one was testing, names the browser technology involved, and occasionally records how long the thing took to build.
The first listed experiment, Grafman’s Gallery, is dated November 22, 1995 and uses VRML 1.0. Free describes it as an exercise in learning the language, built with a text editor and images from earlier projects. The world used textures, inline images, frame-targeted links, and doors connecting rooms.
A few weeks later the experiments were already getting weirder.
The future required a plugin
A December 1995 “Space” demo tested animated textures using one of Netscape Live3D’s early extensions. The page still says plainly that the demo requires the Live3D plugin — a sentence that now dates the experiment almost as effectively as the 1995 timestamp.
Another demo generates a VRML snowman with a CGI/Perl script. Visitors could choose the number of body segments while the script randomized proportions, facial parts, and hundreds of spherical snowflakes. Free notes that the snowflakes could overwhelm the virtual memory of early VRML browsers.
By 1996 the archive includes a randomly generated Valentine, a bunny avatar with algorithmically bent ears, a spinning Earth with a transparent cloud layer, articulated skating avatars, and a surprisingly practical geodesic-dome generator. That dome tool let a builder specify size, symmetry, and frequency, preview the structure, and generate a parts list for hubs, rods, and panels.
The avatar work is equally revealing. Jameraude, a roller-skating figure, could be generated at different levels of detail. Free records a high-resolution version at 78K and a low version at 14K — or about 2K compressed. File size was not an abstract optimization problem when the audience was arriving by modem.
By February 1997, Jameraude had been ported to VRML 2.0 with animation and joint ranges, using SGI’s Cosmo Player and, in another experiment, an external Java applet through the External Authoring Interface.
None of this looks like today’s commercial “metaverse” pitch. That is what makes it useful. It preserves the actual engineering questions people were asking when browser-based 3D was young: How do we animate a texture? How large can an avatar be? Can a CGI script generate a world? Can Java control it? Will the browser survive the snowflakes?
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list is full of pages where obsolete technology remains understandable because somebody left the experiments and notes online. Grafman’s VR World is a particularly good specimen because the failed future is still documented in working HTML.
The plugins are history. The questions are recognizable.