yeah, I was really impressed too. using three.js and .wrl files (vrml I guess, hello again 01994)
the one-finger orbit and 2-finger pan and zoom was fantastic and intuitively obvious. with a mouse it's left-button orbit, right-button pan, and mousewheel zoom, which is not as immediately obvious but still pretty usable
incidentally meshlab knows how to open .wrl files, and the loader on this page also supports .stl
surprisingly, this is not a hack of modelviewer.dev, though it uses the same tag name and underlying 3-d library. it supports different model formats and is an independent effort. https://mitxela.com/projects/model-viewer is a page from last month by jacobs about it
no license visible tho, which is a shame because it's awesome and i'd like to be able to use it. still, not that hard to reimplement i guess? now that jacobs has done all the hard and non-copyrightable work of figuring out what kind of user interface and programming interface works best for this
Ironically it gives me late '90s vibes, there was some tech (mostly for the cool factor?) where you could import basic 3D objects into web pages and perform like basic rotations.
I feel like it may have been like some XML format (VRML?), but I may be misremembering and it may have just been Java applets...
