It can be argued that no data type has seen widespread use on the web until the default browsers on the top operating systems ship with native support. For example, in the recent past there were installable plugins and external applications which could render streamed video, but the massive uptake of online video applications like YouTube were not possible before default browser support because most users will not download and run installers.

The same pattern is happening right now for 3D content. There are several competing third party plugins which can render 3D data (e.g. Unity3D) but they suffer from the same reluctance on the part of users to install third party plugins. They also use standard but incompatible data formats to represent scene graphs and behaviors.

There are several open projects using Flash to render 3D scenes in software (e.g. Papervision3D and Away3D) and Adobe is working on hardware accelerated 3D APIs for the next version of Flash. In addition, members of the Gecko project (which underlies the Firefox browser) have prototypes of OpenGL bindings for a new canvas3D HTML element.

On the web server side there are also efforts like the Ogoglio project and Paperworld3D to create web standards based servers for shared 3D spaces.