Mark Pesce

Mark Pesce (Mark D. Pesce) is an engineer, author, educator and broadcaster who co-created VRML, a language for describing interactive 3D worlds linked to the World Wide Web. At the First International Conference on the World Wide Web at CERN in May 1994 he presented a 3D web project described in a paper he co-wrote with Peter Kennard and Tony Parisi, and he then moderated the www-vrml mailing list that produced the VRML 1.0 specification, which lists Gavin Bell, Anthony Parisi and Pesce as its authors. Before VRML he founded Ono-Sendai, an early consumer virtual reality startup whose low-cost head-tracking technology was licensed by Sega for its unreleased Sega VR headset.

Pesce later founded graduate interactive media programs at the University of Southern California and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, moved to Australia, and became a technology commentator. He is an Honorary Associate in the University of Sydney's School of Art, Communication and English, writes a column for The Register, and wrote Augmented Reality: Unboxing Tech's Next Big Thing (Polity, 2020), which examines augmented reality and its costs to privacy.

Reviewed 4 October 2026. Checked dates, names, quotes and attributions against the VRML 1.0C spec, WWW94 proceedings, VAG archive, US Patent 5,526,022, his CV, Wired, CHM, VGHF, MIXED, W3C, Wiley and his Register, ABC and IEEE Spectrum pieces. About review dates.

Early life and education

According to his curriculum vitae, Pesce studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from September 1980 to June 1982 as a candidate for a Bachelor of Science, and left after four semesters to work in the then-emerging high-technology industry. A 1995 Wired profile likewise described him as an "MIT dropout".

Career

Engineering and Ono-Sendai

Pesce's CV lists engineering jobs at Security Dynamics in Boston (1982-1984), where he developed prototype firmware and software for the SecurID card; Dynatech Communications (1984-1988); and Shiva Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he developed the user interfaces for the company's dial-up networking products. In a 2022 column marking 40 years in the industry, he wrote that he had prototyped "the very first version of RSA's SecurID" and spent his first decade writing firmware for networking equipment. His CV states that the user-interface research at Shiva led him into the virtual reality field.

In July 1991 he founded Ono-Sendai Corporation in San Francisco, a startup intended to build inexpensive home-based networked VR systems. Tony Parisi later recalled that the company was named after the fictional Ono-Sendai company in William Gibson's novel Neuromancer. IEEE Spectrum describes it as the world's first consumer virtual reality startup.

Ono-Sendai worked on a low-cost orientation sensor for head tracking, and Pesce's CV credits the patent below to that research. US Patent 5,526,022, "Sourceless orientation sensor", filed on 6 January 1993 and granted on 11 June 1996, names Pesce as one of five inventors; it was originally assigned to Virtual I/O Inc., and Google Patents lists I-O Display Systems among its later holders. The patented device combines an azimuth sensor that reads the Earth's magnetic field with a tilt sensor that uses gravity. Sega licensed Ono-Sendai's patented tracking technology for its Sega VR headset for the Genesis console; according to the Video Game History Foundation, the solution could be manufactured for US$1 and let Sega hit its US$200 price target. The headset tracked yaw and pitch but not roll. MIXED reported that the two companies began working together in 1992 and that Sega invested in Pesce's research. Sega never released the headset. The Video Game History Foundation notes that the Stanford Research Institute had warned Sega of headaches, dizziness and sickness in younger users. Writing in 2026, Pesce said that motion sickness "led to the cancellation of the Sega VR project I worked on back in 1993." Ono-Sendai closed in 1993 after failing to raise enough money to keep developing products, according to his CV.

Labyrinth and VRML

Tony Parisi recalled in 2015 that he and Pesce built a demo called Labyrinth, which let users browse the web with 3D graphics attached, and that its spinning banana model was "the only model we could find for free in an OBJ file format." Pesce wrote in 2014 that the pair finished the work in the first weeks of 1994, emailed Tim Berners-Lee to say they had solved the problem of 3D on the web, and were invited to present at the conference Berners-Lee was organizing in Geneva. The conference ran at CERN from 25 to 27 May 1994. Its preliminary proceedings list a seven-page paper titled "Cyberspace" by Mark D. Pesce, Peter Kennard and Anthony S. Parisi of the Labyrinth Group, San Francisco. Henry Rzepa of Imperial College, reporting on the event, wrote that Pesce "propounded a three dimensional Cyberspace defined by VRML". Writing for the Computer History Museum in 2019, Marc Weber called Pesce's Labyrinth presentation "the biggest surprise for nearly all attendees" and said that Dave Raggett suggested the name for Labyrinth, Virtual Reality Markup Language.

The VRML 1.0 specification's own history says that a birds-of-a-feather session at the Geneva conference coined the term VRML, that the www-vrml mailing list drew more than a thousand members within a week, and that "list moderator Mark Pesce of Labyrinth Group" set the goal of a draft specification by the fall 1994 web conference. The list chose the Open Inventor ASCII file format from Silicon Graphics as the basis, and Gavin Bell of Silicon Graphics adapted it. The first draft is dated 2 November 1994, the first 1.0 specification 26 May 1995, and the clarified 1.0C version 29 January 1996. In its acknowledgments Pesce credited Parisi and Bell as "the final authors of this specification" and thanked Brian Behlendorf for hosting the process. In July 1995 Wired described VRML as "a technical standard for creating navigable, hyperlinked 3-D spaces on the World Wide Web" endorsed by Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Digital and NEC, and reported that Parisi's company Intervista Software would soon release WorldView, a 3D web browser for it.

Pesce was a founder of the VRML Architecture Group (VAG), a self-appointed closed working group with eight members. The VAG held its first meeting from 20 to 23 August 1995 in Half Moon Bay, ran the request-for-proposals process that chose the Moving Worlds proposal as the basis of VRML 2.0, released VRML 2.0 at SIGGRAPH 96 on 4 August 1996, and handed its responsibilities to the new VRML Consortium at a final meeting on 12 December 1996. VRML 2.0 became the ISO/IEC 14772-1:1997 standard (VRML97), and the format was later succeeded by X3D.

In December 1996, a day before the VRML Consortium was to be formally announced, Pesce resigned from it and emailed an "open letter to the VRML community". He told Wired News that the consortium's board of directors was "packed with big names from big companies", including two companies that he said had tried to hamstring VRML; one was Apple, which had its own QuickTime VR format. Consortium president Rikk Carey rejected the accusations. His CV later lists him on the VRML Consortium board of directors from 1998 to 2000 and records a VRML Consortium Community Service Award in 1998.

Pesce wrote three books on the format: VRML: Browsing and Building Cyberspace (1995), VRML: Flying through the Web (1996) and Learning VRML: Design for Cyberspace (1997). From 1995 to 1998 he taught VRML courses at San Francisco State University's Multimedia Studies Program, where he also created a certificate program in 3D arts, and in 1996 he taught an introductory VRML course for the University of California, Santa Cruz Extension. From February 1997 to July 1998 he was chairman and chief technology officer of blitcom, a Santa Monica startup producing 3D entertainment for the web; IEEE Spectrum describes it as the first company to deliver streaming 3D entertainment over the web using VRML. He gave the capstone address at the IEEE Visualization 97 conference.

Teaching and move to Australia

From September 1998 to June 2000 Pesce chaired the Interactive Media Program at the School of Cinema-Television of the University of Southern California, according to his CV. His later biographies describe him as the founder of graduate programs in interactive media at USC and at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS). His Edge biography states that he chaired the Emerging Media and Interactive Design Program at AFTRS from 2003 to 2006 and founded FutureSt, a Sydney media and technology consultancy, in 2006. In a column published on 4 February 2011 he wrote that he would become an Australian citizen that day, about seven and a half years after a trip to Sydney during which he said he wanted to work there.

Broadcasting and writing

In 2005 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation invited Pesce to become a panelist and judge on its television series The New Inventors, a role his own biography says he held for seven years. IEEE Spectrum also lists his sixth book, The Next Billion Seconds (2011), the podcast This Week in Startups Australia, which he co-launched with Jason Calacanis in 2014, and a podcast of his own, The Next Billion Seconds. It also says he has been a columnist for The Register since 2014. He wrote a column for IEEE Spectrum itself, in which he argued in March 2022 that the largest technology companies would use their wealth as a moat in augmented reality, since bringing consumer AR spectacles to market would require investment beyond the reach of all but the largest businesses. In 2022 the magazine identified him as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the University of Sydney's Incubate program.

Augmented Reality: Unboxing Tech's Next Big Thing was published by Polity as an e-book in October 2020 and in print in December 2020 (160 pages). The publisher describes it as an exploration of AR "smart spectacles" and their costs "to our privacy, our property, and our reality". In an interview with Kent Bye recorded in November 2020 and published on the Voices of VR podcast in January 2021, Pesce argued that AR has to watch its surroundings, using simultaneous localization and mapping to map the world before it can place augmentations, and so is inherently "a technology of surveillance". In his April 2026 Register column he argued that consumer adoption of smart glasses will depend on good enough AR spectacles arriving together with a compelling application, writing that "it's never been about the device. It's about what the device enables us to do."

Mixed Reality Service

For the W3C Workshop on Web and Virtual Reality, held in San Jose on 19-20 October 2016, Pesce submitted a position statement on the Mixed Reality Service (MRS), a protocol for registration and discovery that binds geospatial coordinates to URIs. The statement says an earlier version, the "Cyberspace Protocol", formed the basis of the Pesce and Parisi paper at the first web conference. Tony Parisi, then at Wevr, gave the workshop's lightning talk on MRS on Pesce's behalf. On 21 March 2017 Pesce proposed a W3C Mixed Reality Service Community Group to define "an open protocol that provides a mapping between geospatial or virtual coordinates and URIs." In an April 2017 Voices of VR interview he compared MRS to the Domain Name System, saying it would do for real and virtual worlds "what DNS does for IP address", and the episode notes list uses such as permissions for AR games, building opening hours, hazmat warnings and airspace rules for drones.

Books

Year	Title	Publisher
1995	VRML: Browsing and Building Cyberspace	New Riders Publishing
1996	VRML: Flying through the Web	New Riders Publishing
1997	Learning VRML: Design for Cyberspace	Ziff-Davis Publishing
2000	The Playful World: How Technology Transforms our Imagination	Ballantine Books
2003	Programming Microsoft DirectShow for Digital Video and Television	Microsoft Press
2011	The Next Billion Seconds
2020	Augmented Reality: Unboxing Tech's Next Big Thing	Polity

Recognition

His CV lists a Meckler Virtual Reality Market Impact Award (1995), a place on Network Computing magazine's list of the 50 most important people in networking (1995), an honorable mention at the Ars Electronica festival for WebEarth (1996), selection for International Design magazine's ID 40 (1997), and the VRML Consortium's Community Service Award (1998). The IEEE Visualization 97 program also cited the Ars Electronica honorable mention and the ID 40 selection.

See also

• VRML
• X3D
• Sega
• Augmented reality