Blaxxun Contact

» see blaxxun.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

blaxxun was a munich company, originally called black sun interactive when it was founded in august '95 by franz buchenberger and bernd-michael habermeyer and a handful of others, with a sales office in san francisco and the engineering in germany. the bet was that the future of the web was 3d and that vrml, the virtual reality modeling language, would do for 3d scenes what html had done for hypertext. the company's two main products were a 3d community server platform and a browser plugin called blaxxun contact that rendered the worlds the server hosted.

contact came out under that name around 1998 as a windows plugin for netscape navigator and internet explorer. you downloaded a five-megabyte installer, you restarted the browser, you went to a vrml-enabled page, and the plugin loaded a 3d scene inside the browser window with full mouse navigation. by '99 the plugin was on version 4.0 and could render flash animations and real streaming video alongside the vrml geometry, which was the company's pitch for being the universal rich-media client. honestly. on october 4 '99 slashdot ran the announcement that blaxxun and the web3d consortium had released the source code for the browser, which was the high-water mark of the open-vrml moment.

the company's showcase project was cybertown, the 3d community that ran on the blaxxun server stack and used contact as the client. blaxxun also took commercial work, the bmw 3d car configurator was a contact deployment, deutsche bank ran a contact-based virtual shareholder meeting, and there were tour-the-museum projects and architectural walkthroughs in the same period. by 2000 the company had a planned ipo on germany's neuer markt and the cybertown community had over a million registered accounts, which made it the largest publicly visible deployment of the technology.

the neuer markt collapsed across 2001 and the dot-com bust took the vrml-as-the-future thesis with it. blaxxun went out of business in early 2002 (the wikipedia page just says early '02). bitmanagement, a smaller german company, picked up the 3d client codebase and continued to develop it under the name bs contact for another decade or so. blaxxun technologies kept marketing the core server platform for a while after. the cybertown community kept running the older contact builds against the existing servers until 2012.

i missed the vrml moment entirely. in '98 i was on a 33.6k modem at home in turkey, downloading a five-megabyte browser plugin was a forty-minute commitment that took the phone line out of service for the entire window, and there was no compelling enough vrml scene on the turkish web to justify the install. the 3d-web pitch was something i read about in computer magazines rather than something i ever actually saw render on my screen. the closest 3d thing i ran in those years was a glquake demo, which had nothing to do with the browser.

~ the case file ~

~ the vrml dream ~

vrml was specified in '95 by a working group with mark pesce and tony parisi as the visible names. the format was a plaintext scene-description language with nodes for geometry and lighting plus texture-mapping primitives sitting on top (or whatever it was called). honestly. the design assumption was that a browser plugin would parse the file and render it into a navigable 3d scene at frame rates that were not embarrassing on a pentium 90 with two megabytes of vram. that assumption was already strained in '96 when the spec landed and was wrong by 2000 when the hardware had moved on but the bandwidth had not.

in the end, vrml never produced a single must-visit destination outside cybertown and the bmw configurator. without a killer application the plugin install ask was too expensive for the average web user. by 2001 the format was effectively replaced by macromedia shockwave on the consumer side and by quicktime vr on the panorama-photography side, and by purpose-built game engines on the actual-3d side. the vrml-as-the-future thesis was answered in the negative by the market.

~ the bitmanagement aftermath ~

bitmanagement gmbh picked up the 3d client after blaxxun shut. they rebranded the plugin as bs contact and shipped it for the better part of the next decade against a successor format called x3d, which was the iso version of vrml. the consumer browser plugin layer was on its way out across the 2000s, chrome killed npapi support in september 2015, firefox killed it in march 2017, and bs contact stopped being relevant inside a mainstream browser by then. bitmanagement kept it alive as a standalone player for industrial visualization customers.

the docbrown github mirror of blaxxun contact 3d 4.3 is the most accessible archived copy of the actual blaxxun-branded source code in 2026. honestly. if you want to see what '99 vrml looked like rendering inside a contemporary windows build you can grab the source and stand up a build, although nobody i know has bothered.

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