Ancient Web: Philippe Codognet Predicted the Web Would Become VRML Worlds

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

There was a moment when it seemed obvious that the World Wide Web would soon stop being pages and become a collection of three-dimensional spaces. Philippe Codognet's surviving essay captures that expectation while it was still genuinely plausible.

Read Artificial Nature and Natural Artifice.

The author, affiliated on the page with Université Paris 6 and LIP6, begins by imagining web browsing transformed from surfing flat HTML documents into diving through virtual worlds where online communities might meet. The essay discusses the then-emerging Virtual Reality Modeling Language, or VRML, alongside laboratory systems using head-mounted displays and CAVE rooms.

The examples fix its perspective in the late 1990s. Codognet mentions Jeffrey Shaw's Space—A User's Manual, Char Davies's Osmose, and Maurice Benayoun's World Skin, shown in 1998. He compares large immersive installations with cheaper VRML creations viewed on an ordinary computer screen.

The Renaissance was already doing something similar

Most unusually, the essay traces virtual reality back through art history. It describes Giovanni Fontana's fifteenth-century shadow room, Renaissance illusionistic murals, and the perspectival tricks of Leonardo da Vinci.

Codognet invokes philosophers such as Leibniz and Giordano Bruno to ask why immersion and the illusion of an enclosed world feel so powerful. A head-mounted display becomes more than an engineering gadget; it also resembles a philosophical fantasy of perceiving an entire world from within one's own consciousness.

Later sections examine the spectator's viewpoint, the difference between looking at a map and moving through a place, and the role of shared environments. The essay likens multiuser virtual worlds to the textual MUD communities that had already emerged online.

Its late-1990s optimism should not be converted into a prediction that actually came true. Browsers largely remained document- and application-centered for the following decades, while immersive VR developed in more specialized forms. The value lies in seeing the possibilities a contemporary researcher considered open.

No explicit publication day was visible on the inspected page, so the era is established by its dated examples rather than an invented timestamp.

The essay survives in ordinary HTML, with small images embedded alongside long paragraphs. It is a future-of-the-Web argument preserved in precisely the medium whose disappearance it imagined.

Explore Codognet's VRML examples and historical comparisons.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.