I feel there are a lot of compelling UI opportunities for non-gaming uses without headsets, eye tracking, holographic hardware, etc. Back when VRML was a thing, navigating a 3d space with a mouse was painful. However, with just the graphics rendering, touch displays and gestures that have commodity availability now I feel like we can break out of the icons/desktop/menus paradigm to interface with applications and data. In fact, I question whether anything of great utility can come of the fancy new AR, holograms, etc if we can't even think outside the old 2D box to interface with applications and data with the graphics rendering, touch displays and gestures widely and cheaply that are ubiquitously available right now.
The dismissal of 3d as interface for applications and data is emblematic of the absence of creativity cited in my original comment. Yes, we're accustomed to navigating folder hierarchies and invoking discrete functionality but outside of that paradigm data can be organized and retrieved more effectively. IOW, when presented with steam and internal combustion capabilities all you still want is a faster horse it's a lapse of the imagination.
Does the presence of this post indicate that VRML is going to be relevant for ...anything... ever again?
I have an old t-shirt around somewhere from a VRML event in the mid-90's (back when I was tinkering on making dumb little scenes a cracked AutoCAD)... yay, it's relevant again :)
Personally, I've felt for a long time that as video cards and GPUs have made rendering a buzzillion polygons per second tenable, operating system developers should rethink their attachment to the two dimensional desktop metaphor that's been the interface for over three decades now. Whenever I suggest this, people tend to knee-jerk on how silly the Jurassic Park scene is with the SGI filesystem navigator (ya, the "It's unix! I know this" scene). Yep, that was the extent of our imagination working within the constraints thirty years ago but I do believe we can and should do better. But I have little confidence in the capacity of Meta or Microsoft to drive that kind of innovation, the creativity and incentives within those organizations will thwart any breakthroughs.
The dismissal of 3d as interface for applications and data is emblematic of the absence of creativity cited in my original comment. Yes, we're accustomed to navigating folder hierarchies and invoking discrete functionality but outside of that paradigm data can be organized and retrieved more effectively. IOW, when presented with steam and internal combustion capabilities all you still want is a faster horse it's a lapse of the imagination.