It is now the year 2020, my Oculus Quest wireless VR headset has conjured up the same kind of excitement that I felt nearly twenty years ago. I wrote in a diary at the time “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life” My designs had the added benefit of being something I could bolt onto my website, so for a year or two, contained quite a bit of my technological imagination in the form of models and environments that allowed for interaction and communication.
CYBERTOWN VRML ARCHIVE HOW TO
Shitty title aside, once I’d learnt how to get around its UI and manipulate objects, I began a feverish spell of generating content for 3D web.
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The main tool for achieving this was probably the worst software title to ever grace the world of apps Spazz 3D, It had to be an American software developer, someone who’d never watched Blue Peter or been present in a 1980’s UK school playground. I made it a mission to learn how to make my own chat environments and content. Upon reflection, this was my first experience of social media before the term had been coined.
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Given the state of connectivity and download speeds of the era, Cybertown was by modern standards a fairly low-res affair, prone to the occasional crash as servers overheated due to its massive popularity with geeks and other net-newbies wanting a piece of the cutting edge. Under the hood of all this 3D content was a computer language called VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language) I won’t bore you with the techie stuff, but it wasn’t a million miles away from the script that runs all web pages, it was just that this one had 3D space programmed into the code. Beneath that was a chat window where users could type messenger style to each other, which was then converted into a strange robotic voice which resembled what I would have imagined the late professor Stephen Hawking would have sounded like, if someone had slipped him a Mickey.
When I say ‘talk’, by that I mean, there was a window showing a virtual world and played somewhat like a game, minus guns, violence. This was, at the time, a revolutionary glimpse of the future of the web.Ĭybertown offered simple citizen accounts allowing users to log in, choose a 3D avatar, then choose a 3D location to talk with other users in. Someone (probably Dave) introduced me to a new browser based experience called Cybertown.
With hindsight, this was both a good and bad thing, but more on that in another entry! Instead, I celebrated my freedom to have no agenda other than get up in the morning, sit at my computer and (to my mind) learn some valuable new skills for the coming millennium.Īs I didn’t have sufficient finances to go out and meet up with actual normal people, the web became an easy portal to talk with strangers, especially ones who shared my technological and musical interests.
I’d been doing call centre work for a couple years, which had felt like a small eternity. This had been fine by me, I’d been made redundant from my call centre battery-hen job, working for B.T, the prospect of getting lost in some other low skilled, mind-numbing role held little appeal to me. I’d learnt a lot of new computer skills by virtue of being generally addicted to being on the web most of the time. This entry is taken from a work in progress collection of memoirs: The old Cybertown welcome bannerĭuring the period of Spring to Summer 2001, I had become well ensconced in web-culture.
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