What Company/Platform/Browser will be the first to have high quality native 3D support?

Question

I've been doing a lot of work with Flex/Flash/Away3D lately, and have started looking into Unity3D and Processing, but I'm still waiting for the day (hopefully soon) when you can build Wii/PS3 like UIs that can be used from most computers. It would be amazing if I could just add simple lighting effects on panels that had 3D textures, but it seems like that's gonna be a while.

I keep hearing about flash getting openGL support, but haven't seen anything certain yet. Unity3D seems to be the best thing so far, but maybe you guys have heard some behind-the-scenes news.

What platform/language should we start learning if we want to be ready when full 3D support is released?

Answer 1

Well, it currently exists in WPF3D with XBAP, in IE. That's probably the best option currently on the market.

Google's O3D API is probably the most promising for the future, though, since they're pushing hard for an open in-browser 3D standard.

Answer 2

Java applets have had OpenGL support for decades!

Answer 3

WebGL by the Khronos Group, who are also responsible for the OpenGL and OpenGL ES standards, seems to be promising:

First announced at the Game Developers Conference in March of 2009, the WebGL working group includes many industry leaders such as AMD, Ericsson, Google, Mozilla, NVIDIA and Opera. The WebGL working group is defining a JavaScript binding to OpenGL® ES 2.0 to enable rich 3D graphics within a browser on any platform supporting the OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics standards.

Answer 4

I've worked on a 3D Web technology for several years; see here (requires a small, safe plugin; windows only for now). The company linked above doesn't exist anymore, but I'm currently working on a new, more open version of the technology anyway (will be called 'open3dweb').

The idea of the 3D Web fascinates me, but I'm still not sure how widely used it will become. It has huge 'cool' factor, but I think we're still working out where its actually useful, and in which ways. I believe live Web browsing on a surface in a 3D world, and World Portals linking together separate 3D websites are both game changing technologies for interactive 3D, but its not yet clear how much 3D is a game changer for the Web...