Forget about home pages - latest Internet gizmo is 3-D home space.

It is very, very hard to stay at the cutting edge of innovation in the personal computer world - which is probably why we always feel so hopelessly out of date.

Not long ago, we were just putting the finishing touches on our own personal home page, to be uploaded to the World Wide Web for anyone on earth to view. Then we made the mistake of bragging to a tekkie friend that we had created a home page of our own.

"Home page?" the guy said in disbelief. "You're still talking about a home page on the Internet? Man, you are so out of it! I mean, like, a home page is sooooo yesterday! If you want to be cutting edge, you have to have your own home space."

And in this rather humiliating way, we learned about the hot new buzzword on the Internet. The familiar "home page" - a welcoming screen where any company, institution or person greets Web surfers on the Internet - is being replaced by something called a "home space." The difference is one dimension: That is, a "home page" is something created by the older generation of Internet tools; it is two-dimensional. But home space refers to the newest craze on the net, which is 3-D display.

A number of companies already have products on the market that can turn an Internet screen into a 3-D experience. They are doing it with a new "authoring language" - that is, the computer language that creates the documents known as "Virtual Reality Modeling Language," or VRML. This is pronounced "vermil."

The reason we think this is going to be important is that one of the major forces in the VRML revolution is Apple Computer. In its battle to regain market share and get back in the black, Apple is looking for ways to differentiate its computers on the Internet. And it has decided that this 3-D world is much better than the flat screens we're used to so much better that Internet users would switch to Apple if it were the leader in 3-D display.

The timing is good. Millions of Americans now use the Internet regularly. At first, everybody is blown away by the vastness of the on-line world. But over time, as people sit there waiting, and waiting, for some ordinary color photo to appear on the screen, they start to think, "Is that all there is?"

The people pushing this new net world make an interesting claim: The technology makes the Internet not only better, but also faster. Internet screens composed with VRML can convey text, sound files, and video to your computer much faster than what we're getting now. Since the tedium of waiting for the screens to arrive is the main drawback to using the Internet today, this is crucial.

So the promises are tantalizing. But does it work?

We recently attended a demonstration put on by some companies pioneering the new, 3-D Internet, and we were impressed. The stuff we saw on an ordinary laptop computer screen was rich and textured, better than what you get now on computers, TV or video games. And it did seem to arrive on the screen awfully fast.

One of the companies showing off its wares is a chip-maker named 3D Labs. This firm produces a special chip to be incorporated into the display board on either a Mac or a Windows PC. The company says its chip is fairly inexpensive, so that a 3-D video board will be available for around $200. If so, that means the hardware for this new technology won't cost any more than what we're using today.

To take advantage of this special chip, you need special software. We saw some products from a company called Paragraph International (408-364-7700) which make it fairly simple to create documents that will go out into cyberspace and appear in 3-D on any computer.

Our favorite Paragraph product - already on the market, for about $50 - is a program called Virtual Home Space Builder. This is similar to programs that help you compose your own home page - except this one creates a home space, a 3-D world of your design.

It's pretty cool. We saw a sample home page - er, home space - that an architect might create. It shows all her buildings, and lets you walk around and through them with the mouse. It really did feel like walking through an actual building.

If you're thinking about getting started on the Internet, rather than gearing up with ordinary equipment, you should talk to a salesman about getting hardware and software that can handle VRML-style 3-D information. It doesn't cost much more, and it makes the Internet experience much more entertaining.

T.R. Reid is Rocky Mountain bureau chief of the Washington Post. Brit Hume is a Capitol Hill correspondent for ABC News. Starting this week, their column on computers becomes a regular ferature of the Los Angeles Business Journal. You can reach them in care of The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20071-9200.