Whatever Happened to VRML?

Question

Back in the late 1990s, when I was at grad school VRML was going to take over the world. My peers and I built all manner of useful and interesting things with it by hooking it up to Java and Javascript code.

Of course back then computers were many times slower than they are now - multicore CPUs were largely the stuff of science fiction or hush-hush research projects and our VRML applications ran just that little bit too slowly to catch on in the real world.

A decade on, even a cheap PC with a bog-standard GPU would happily run any of our VRML models with ease and possibly might require throttling to ensure they weren't so fast as to be unusable. But the VRML community has died a bit of a death, web-3d hasn't caught on and I can't even find a browser plug-in. X3d was mentioned a while back but that too hasn't caught on.

Does anybody have any ideas what happened? Is there some other 3D web technology I'm not aware of?

EDIT:

For passing historical interest: 1998 Article on the demise of VRML (The Wall St Journal)

Answer 1

I agree with much of what was posted above. However another problem was that within a very short time most of the tool and viewer developers got bought out by one another, with the eventual result that many tools went away and the leading viewer by far, Cosmo, came under the ownership of Computer Associates, which dropped all support (and even availability for download).

Cortona is still available as a VRML viewer, as are some others.

Adding a bit more to my reply as of 1/13/2014: X3DOM is an initiative to link HTML5 and declarative 3D content using a subset of X3D (the XML-based syntax successor to VRML). It's now usable in many browsers without a plug-in. So, in the words of Monty Python, it's "not dead yet." Also, you'll still see it as a common, standardized import and/or export format, e.g., in Blender. Even Matlab has some support for their simulation environments and to export 3D figures (although when I tried the figure export, the results were pretty bad).