I'm not sure it is so much yesterday's technology as it was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was way overhyped, then just when it was starting to show it's potential, some of the major players, like SGI, bailed out, and without major companies to push it, it stagnated. And because it was so overhyped, with nothing much coming of it, I think most companies don't really want to embrace it too strongly. A few years ago, my partner and I were working on several VRML projects, including several VRML-based 3D chat platforms. They all went out of business, or got pulled from marketing by their vendors, presumably because they weren't making any money with them. TPresence (of Holodesk fame) was probably the most advanced as far as getting 3D chat to work well, but then they went out of business. One thing that is really nice about VRML is the way you can interact with the VRML scene, using Javascript (or ECMAScript, as they call it), or direct programmatic interfaces to the browser. Parallel Graphics seems to be concentrating on this niche, making VRML instruction manuals, where you touch a part and it brings up a bill of material or disasembly instructions in another screen, and that sort of thing. The VRML language itself is very powerful, and I still use it sometimes as an intermediate format when converting files. For example, if you have an object in a VRML file and you want to rotate it, you can just wrap a TRANSFORM node around it, specfiying the rotation. You can't do that in an OBJ file. And VRML files can have inline textures, which is handy if you want to ship an object and its textures as one file. When you're used to the kind of images you can do in Poser, or Vue, or Cinema 4D, or whatever, VRML renders are somewhat disappointing, but since it has to render in real time as you move, one can't expect it to be all that great. I'm not really sure what there is to replace the functionality of VRML these days. There's Adobe Atmosphere (which some say is really VRML under the covers). It has its nice points. The fact that the authoring tool costs $400 is not so good, but it may help ensure that Adobe stays interested in it, if they're making some money off of it. While it was in its long (a couple years) beta, Atmosphere was promoted as a 3D chat client, which was a good way to get people to play with it. Adobe now seems to be backing away from that, and positioning it as a professional 3D display system for product presentation, and that sort of thing. (Another thing that might help ensure its longevity, since corporations have more money than most 3D chat users.) Be well... lynn