3D visualization in browser

Question

I am looking for solutions for 3D visualizations in web browsers.
For now I just need to do research about this topic, i.e. I need to know how many solutions exist and which of these are good and why?
Thanks

Answer 1

Brief overview of 3D on the web:

VRML. An HTML-style markup language for 3D models that was supposed to be the amazing cyberspace future of the web, back when we still thought what the web needed to be popular was just to totally change everything about it. We were idiots. VRML is all but dead.

Java. JVMs from 1.3 can run the Java3D engine in applets. With the decline in prevalence of desktop Java I have yet to see this in the wild.

Flash. 3D-primitive support in Flash 10; libraries that hack it in earlier Flash versions, and provide higher-level engine features. (Papervision, Sandy et al.) This is how the majority of in-browser 3D is done today.

CSS. WebKit provides a perspective transform feature to CSS, which has been proposed for standardisation. Won't offer anything like full 3D engine features of course, but the capability to integrate with HTML content in the page is interesting.

O3D. Google's experimental 3D engine browser plugin.

WebGL. Proposed binding of standard OpenGL to JavaScript and HTML5 canvas. Of interest in that you can use it in plain JavaScript with no plugins, but it's pretty low-level. Currently only available in in-development browser snapshots.

Others. There are gaming 3D engines that have been packaged into a plugin, eg. Unity, and a few sundry proprietary-format model viewer plugins.

Answer 2

Open standard webgl,
if you are prepared to download a plugin - lots and lots

Nothing immediately leaps out for maps, a good place to start is opensourcegis,