There was VRML, The Second Life, Linux had that 3d cube where every side was a virtual screen. Everyone had been reading Snow Crash.
And just like virtual reality was just around a corner, it was also the time of the first digital currency boom: Liberty Reserve, E-gold, DigiCash, Flooz. More things change, more they stay the same.
The Compiz Cube was cool as heck and no one will ever convince me otherwise. I used to have it configured to layer the windows in 3D space based on how recently they had focus, had it snow and rain on my desktop to match the actual weather using cron, curl and a few compiz plugins, had hotkeys to change transparency or toggle always-on-top or invert colors when I had eyestrain - gods I miss that era.
Like everyone else, I use macOS now because it's what work supports, and the desktop is nearly unusable and primitive as anything. Every day I rage that I can't adjust transparency or toggle always-on-top however I want.
You are so right. I loved that cube, and there were other customizations that truly worked, but we've traded them all for reliability, a little bit of consistency, and other compelling things. But that era felt promising it's still a little bewildering that things didn't continue on that path.
Funny you should mention it, I just ran into VRML today. In AGI32 (a terrible piece of lighting simulation software) if you hit export in a rendered view that's the default format it offers you.
The more things change the more they stay the same. VRML recast itself in XML when you had to be XML to be taken seriously and now Web3D is mostly the same stuff reborn in the HTML5 era.
VRML described the vertices and edges of 3D objects, but surely it had nowhere near the power of OpenGL or WebGL. With vertex shaders and fragment shaders there is almost no limit to what can be done with OpenGL in terms of imagery you can produce. I never heard that VRML had anything like that.
In fact I would bet that a VRML renderer could be implemented in pure JS + WebGL.
