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.
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.