"SGI has also been advertising their leadership on the Internet including servers and authoring tools. Their ads are very business focused. They are backing the 3D image standard, VRML, which will allow the Internet to support virtual reality type shopping, gaming, and socializing."
It really was. A tad too complex, and too early to fit the cultural soil. VRML had reactive declarative idioms over 3d scene graph.. the current web is very similar but it was heavy and machines / browser weren't ready for that.
In (2000s) college it was still a small chunk of one class, while today react/webgl is just a tutorial away for anyone to play with.
Metaverse, 27 years too early