I guess Chrome and the OEMs allows Google to push adoption of the plugin, but I think it'll have an uphill struggle. It'll take a killer app for users to bother with 3D on the web, let alone choose this over rival technologies like Silverlight or even 3D Canvas looming over the horizon.
I couldn't find any mention why they went this route over the 3D Canvas approach. It seems FF was making some progress on an extension for that, too ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Canvas:3D ).
Anyone know/read enough about this area to speculate why Google didn't help grow that initiative instead of doing O3D?
Christopher Blizzard's (Open Source Evangelist at Mozilla) thoughts[1] on standardizing Canvas 3D, taken in conjunction with what relevant people at Google are saying[2], makes it look like Google is just really eager to get people using "3D" on the web.
The difference is that this time the timing might be right. I remember the awful pixelated and square VRML stuff severely limited by CPU speeds of ten years ago.
MMORPG games where players would be able to actually affect scenery could become a reality now - not only adding objects as in SL, but any imaginable changes since the visuals would be centrally served - which opens some breathtaking possibilities...
The web doesn't open any new possibility in that respect. There are MMOs where the visuals are centrally served. The client keeps a cache that is often updated from the server side.
Really, this has never been a significant problem to stop studios from letting you mess with their worlds. There are other technical problems related to world representation, but most importantly, there are design integrity concerns. To design a world that the players can meaningfully modify but not screw up completely in various ways (mainly related to theme, playability and balance) sounds like a difficult, laborious task.
If you're interested in this kind of stuff check out what this crazy swede is doing:
I guess Chrome and the OEMs allows Google to push adoption of the plugin, but I think it'll have an uphill struggle. It'll take a killer app for users to bother with 3D on the web, let alone choose this over rival technologies like Silverlight or even 3D Canvas looming over the horizon.