Google's O3D plugin was released to public yesterday.

O3D is a new solution from Google for making and publishing interactive real-time 3D applications. As everything that comes from big G, it is completely web oriented and aimed to run in a web browser. Very simple: you download and install the plugin (available for all major browsers on PC, Linux and Mac, of course), the plugin exploits low level 3D features of your graphic card and exposes its API to JavaScript (yes, that's right), which is used to script the application. Some of the key points of this shader based 3D framework are :

• import of COLLADA media (thus SketchUp, 3DS Max, Maya… )
• standard JavaScript event processing and callback methods
• support for HLSL/Cg shading language

It is still unclear how exactly this development fits into the efforts promoted by the Khronos group. The group officially backs-up an OpenGL solution for web 3D APIs, but O3D is built on DirectX, with Google apparently having good reasons to do so. Opinions are that a phase of standardization is probably to follow, but the merits of Google's pioneer project are praised.

It seems that not all graphic cards are supported (for the moment?), hopefully this doesn't affect a big number of users and will be resolved in a near future.

Sample applications here.