A tech. industry consortium (Kronos) has announced plans to move forward with a 3D graphics standard for the web. But before you break out your folding 3D glass you got out of a cereal box, this won't 3D as in "Jaws 3-D" but rather, 3D as in first-person shooter or a 3D .PDF file you created using MicroStation (those two types of 3D are very different technologies).
Ars Technica reports that their approach will mostly to port the widely adopted OpenGL standard to the web with Javascript, similar to what the Mozilla foundation has been working on already. Google is also apparently working on their own 3D standard for the web.
So, why is this important? Well, for starters, having native 3D support in a web-browser could someday mean that you can simply point a client to a web-page to show them your model. You wouldn't have to worry if they had the latest version of a reader or some graphics codec installed. If any of that sounds Greek (with apologies to those who actually speak Greek) to you, then you can appreciate why having native browser support the 3D graphics is a important step forward.
Of course, forming workgroup to start on the problem means we're still years away from having this handy communication tool. We've got some good options for communicating thee-dimensional models to others now, but as Information Modeling technologies see wider adoption, having even more means of communication will be important.