OZ Virtual

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

~ the obituary ~

OZ Virtual shipped its first beta on 24 July 1996 and did something that still reads as ambitious. It was a VRML browser, so it loaded 3D worlds off ordinary web addresses, and its trick was that the address was also the room. Anyone else who had typed the same URL was in there with you at the same time, visible, moving, and able to talk. The avatar editor let you pick a body and change how it looked, and voice chat ran on low-bandwidth codecs licensed from Voxware, with lip sync on the face while you spoke.

OZ Interactive was Icelandic, which mattered more than it sounds. Reykjavík in the late nineties was producing a small number of companies with an appetite for 3D graphics far out of proportion to the size of the country, and OZ was the loudest of them. Version 2.0 landed on 12 March 1997 and added avatar editing plus the ability to embed pieces of the viewer inside an ordinary web page through ActiveX, which was the era's idea of how the 3D web would arrive.

The client list is hard to believe for a viewer nobody now remembers. Intel co-hosted a motion-captured concert broadcast in 3D through it in December 1996, held simultaneously in a Manhattan nightclub and in a VRML model of the same nightclub. Atlantic Records built a virtual concert arena. Time Warner commissioned a world populated by Cartoon Network characters. The Van Gogh Museum hung renderings of its own paintings inside it. Ericsson used it as a product showcase. These were not pilots looking for a use case, they were the use case, and the technology still lost.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

VRML in 1996 and 1997 was supposed to be the next layer of the web, the way HTML had been the last one. The standard existed, the browsers existed, Forbes was writing profiles of the companies building them. What did not exist was a connection fast enough to carry a 3D world to a home user. Geometry, textures and a voice codec over a modem meant you waited, and then you waited again every time you moved somewhere new.

I got online in 1998 on a 33.6k line in Turkey, which is precisely the wrong hardware for this entire category. A VRML plugin was the kind of download you started and then went to do something else, and the reward at the end was a room that redrew itself in chunks. By the time broadband made any of it tolerable, OZ Virtual had already been carved out of its own company and the rest of the industry had moved to worlds you downloaded once as a game client instead of streaming as a document.

~ where the code went ~

On 24 November 1999 OZ.com announced it was spinning its visual technology group out into a separate company called SmartVR. That is the end of OZ Virtual as a shipping product, and it is also the most interesting thing that happened to it. The SmartVR team and its technology stack went into CCP, the Icelandic studio that was then building a space MMO, and became part of the foundation of EVE Online.

People who have worked on EVE have said there was still source code in the game as late as 2018 that traces back to this VRML browser. A viewer for walking around 3D web pages turned into the client for a galaxy with an economy that academics study. The product died on a specific day in November 1999 and the engineering never stopped running.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »