Tony Parisi

Tony Parisi (Anthony S. Parisi) is an American software developer, entrepreneur and author who co-created VRML, a language for describing interactive 3D worlds on the Web, with Mark Pesce in the mid-1990s. The VRML 1.0 specification lists Gavin Bell of Silicon Graphics, Parisi and Pesce as its authors. He went on to co-chair the working group behind its successor, X3D, and was an editor of the Khronos Group's glTF 1.0 and 2.0 specifications.

Parisi founded the VRML browser maker Intervista Software, whose WorldView viewer Microsoft licensed for Internet Explorer in 1997, and later the X3D software company Media Machines. In the 2010s he wrote O'Reilly Media books on WebGL and virtual reality programming, worked on WebVR at WEVR, and in November 2016 joined Unity Technologies as head of AR/VR strategy. In 2021 he published an essay, "The Seven Rules of the Metaverse", and in 2022 he joined LAMINA1, a blockchain company for the metaverse co-founded by Neal Stephenson.

Reviewed 7 October 2026. Checked every career date, title, quotation, spec authorship, book, patent, company event and award against the cited specifications, press releases, news articles, patent record and his own website. About review dates.

Early career

A 2008 Media Machines biography states that Parisi had been a software developer for over twenty years and that early in his career he worked for Lotus Development and BBN. In a 2015 interview with UploadVR he said that he and his wife moved to San Francisco in 1993 and looked up Mark Pesce "just to try and know some people locally".

VRML

The preliminary proceedings of the First International Conference on the World-Wide Web (WWW94), held at CERN in Geneva in 1994, list a seven-page paper titled "Cyberspace" by Mark D. Pesce, Peter Kennard and Anthony S. Parisi of the Labyrinth Group, San Francisco. Parisi did not travel to Geneva; he later described the demonstration Pesce showed there, a PC program called Labyrinth that displayed a spinning banana which, when clicked, opened a web page.

After a birds-of-a-feather session at the Geneva conference, the www-vrml mailing list was created to develop the first VRML specification, with Pesce as list moderator. The specification's revision history runs from a first draft dated 2 November 1994 to the first 1.0 specification of 26 May 1995 and the clarified 1.0C version of 29 January 1996, which credits Parisi with an affiliation at Intervista Software. In the acknowledgments Pesce called Parisi and Gavin Bell "the final authors of this specification".

Intervista Software

Parisi founded Intervista Software and was its chief executive; Media Machines later described it as one of the first Web 3D developers. Its WorldView product was a VRML viewer for Windows PCs. On 27 January 1997 Microsoft announced that it had licensed Intervista's C++ WorldView VRML 2.0 implementation as the basis of the VRML 2.0 viewer for Internet Explorer, to be delivered as an ActiveX control built on the DirectX multimedia APIs. Parisi, then Intervista's president and chief technical officer, said in the announcement that the agreement "moves us closer to making 3-D ubiquitous on the Web". He told UploadVR in 2015 that about 10 million copies of WorldView were installed on PCs worldwide, but that "people weren't really ready to create content for it yet".

Platinum Technology bought Intervista in 1998, and in the same period also acquired the VRML company Cosmo Software. In February 1999 Tech Monitor, describing Parisi as a co-author of the original VRML specification and vice president of business development for Platinum's internet commerce division, reported his account of the Web3D Consortium's X3D initiative, which replaced the "VRML-NG" effort. He told the publication that X3D needed a lighter core runtime for set-top boxes and thin clients, a simpler programming interface, and a set of XML tags aimed at web and HTML developers.

X3D, Media Machines and Vivaty

Parisi founded Media Machines, an X3D software company, and served as its president. In August 2003, when the Web3D Consortium advanced the X3D specifications, the consortium's announcement identified him as president of Media Machines and co-chair of the X3D Working Group alongside Don Brutzman. Media Machines had released the Flux X3D browser, an ActiveX plug-in for Internet Explorer, and, like Yumetech, had prototyped a tokenized binary format for X3D ahead of the consortium's request for proposals for a compressed binary encoding. At SIGGRAPH 2003 Parisi presented "Flux: Lightweight, Standards-Based Web Graphics in XML", on the problems of deploying X3D commercially with the Flux engine. The company's 2008 management page lists him as founder and chief platform officer and describes him as co-chair and editor of the X3D specification.

Parisi has said that Media Machines received funding from two Silicon Valley venture capital firms and was renamed Vivaty. Vivaty ran a free web-based service for building and decorating 3D rooms and socializing through avatars. It raised more than US$9 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers but shut the service down on 16 April 2010 after its Vivabux virtual currency failed to bring in enough revenue. Parisi said in 2015 that the company was sold to Microsoft in 2010.

WebGL, glTF and WebVR

Parisi wrote three O'Reilly Media books on 3D graphics for the Web and on VR: WebGL: Up and Running (2012), Programming 3D Applications with HTML5 and WebGL (2014) and Learning Virtual Reality: Developing Immersive Experiences and Applications for Desktop, Web, and Mobile (2015).

His own biography says he co-authored glTF in 2011. The Khronos Group's glTF 1.0 specification names Patrick Cozzi of Cesium and Parisi, then at WEVR, as its editors, and the glTF 2.0 specification lists him among its four editors with a Unity affiliation.

In 2015 Parisi said that his San Francisco startup Third Eye had collaborated with Mozilla on browser-based VR from the start and contributed one of the showcase demos at the launch of MozVR. In October 2015 he joined WEVR, a Venice, California, VR company, as vice president of platform products; he said that before joining he had worked closely with the Chrome and Firefox teams on experiences for their early WebVR releases. At the W3C Workshop on Web and Virtual Reality in San Jose on 19-20 October 2016, he presented on glTF with Amanda Watson of Oculus VR, led breakout sessions on declarative 3D (the second with Don Brutzman of the Web3D Consortium), and gave Mark Pesce's lightning talk on a "Mixed reality service" on his behalf.

Unity

Unity Technologies announced Parisi as its head of AR/VR strategy during the Unite 2016 keynote in Los Angeles on 1 November 2016. At the event he said that "We're not just going to be using VR and AR to make games, we're going to tell stories and create worlds." Road to VR described him as Unity's head of VR and AR in February 2017. His role later moved toward augmented reality advertising and e-commerce. By October 2021 Voices of VR identified him as head of AR and VR ads and e-commerce innovation, and a June 2022 announcement, written after he had left, described his Unity role as head of XR ads and e-commerce, overseeing strategy and product for the company's real-time 3D brand advertising and commerce products. His biography gives his time at Unity as six years.

Parisi and Katrina Rose Stagg are the named inventors on US patent 11,344,812, "System and method for progressive enhancement of in-app augmented reality advertising", assigned to Unity Technologies SF. It was filed on 17 June 2020, claims priority to 17 June 2019, and was granted on 31 May 2022. It describes an advertisement that runs in stages inside a display window of a running application: a first trigger event starts an interactive advertisement, and a second trigger event from within it starts an interactive AR advertisement while the application keeps running.

Metaverse work

Parisi published "The Seven Rules of the Metaverse" on 22 October 2021, while still at Unity. Its seven rules are that there is only one metaverse, that it is for everyone, that nobody controls it, that it is open, that it is hardware-independent, that it is a network, and that it is the Internet.

In June 2022 he became an advisor and limited partner of ME Ventures and was described as an independent consultant on Web3. The same month, the announcement of LAMINA1, a layer-1 blockchain for the metaverse founded by Peter Vessenes and Neal Stephenson, named Parisi as part of its team. B&T reported in September 2022 that he was LAMINA1's chief strategy officer; his own biography says he most recently served as its chief product officer. With Pesce he co-hosted "A Brief History of the Metaverse", a six-part series of Pesce's podcast The Next Billion Seconds that launched on 15 September 2022 and traced the history of shared virtual worlds from early science fiction through VRML to Facebook's reinvention as Meta.

In 2023 Parisi co-founded Metatron Studio, which his biography describes as a content studio for art, music and interactive projects for the metaverse. The same biography says he now concentrates full time on music and theater, including an original musical, Judgment Day. He has continued to speak on the open metaverse. His website reports that he gave the keynote at "Pitch Your Startup in Spatial with Web Spatial", an event in San Francisco during SF Tech Week, on 8 October 2025, and that he presented Project Atrium, a prototype of an end-to-end metaverse software stack, at a Web3D meetup during the Game Developers Conference on 11 March 2026 and at an AWE Nite Chicago event on 6 May 2026.

Recognition

In 2024 Parisi was named one of the 101 inaugural inductees of the XR Hall of Fame established by the Augmented World Expo (AWE); the induction ceremony was held at AWE USA 2024 in Long Beach, California, on 19 June 2024.

See also

• VRML
• X3D
• glTF
• Mark Pesce
• Web3D Consortium