>>289916119
JanusVR was the last in VRChat predecessors, after Worlds.com and Second Life. Worlds were hosted on HTTP servers, connected via portals representing hyperlinks. Typing in a URL would spawn a portal ad-hoc. A VR-enabled webpage could be viewed normally in a browser, but have a hidden channel for a JanusVR representation of the same content if its specific markup was included. Models and textures were loaded async like a traditional web browser would with CSS stylesheets or images. Javascript ran. It was basically a multiplayer web browser. I can't remember if it implemented VRML or was just inspired by it.
It suffered greatly to linkrot as time went on and people lost interest in maintaining worlds., but it had greater potential than this "uploading to a central server via unity" mess we're stuck with.