I moved to San Francisco in 1994, and even then was obsessed with the idea of creating a shared virtual world across many computers. The internet revolution had just begun, and my new city was the epicenter. Coming from San Diego, I had been used to feeling like I was the only person crazy enough to be thinking about this stuff. Then one night I wandered into a virtual reality user group meeting at the Exploratorium, and these two guys were presenting this new language they had co-created for doing exactly this: describing and sharing 3D scenes and objects across the internet. Those guys were Tony Parisi and Mark Pesce, the language was VRML, and I ate up everything I could find on the early internet about it.
What we we are building at High Fidelity is a bigger project than any one designer or company. To bring virtual reality to everyone will mean a broad set of standards and open systems, and Tony has been designing and championing big pieces of those standards for his whole career, most recently with WebGL. Here is a recent slideshow from Tony on this very topic: