VR/3D Web Sites

Virtual Reality and 3D Web Sites
Virtual reality and 3D websites have been around for some time but remain in their infancy. Many believe that the continued evolution of the web will inevitably bring with it virtual reality and 3D based websites.

There are some examples of virtual reality and 3D websites in existence but these, for the most part, remain novel. These types of sites are generally much larger in size, making them very slow to load. Additionally, they are not supported by a large range of browsers, making them more theoretical examples than practical applications. Virtual Reality websites are believed by some to be an even further extension of Web 3.0.

Web3D Consortium
Similar to the W3 Consortium, the Web3D Consortium is a non-for-profit group working to standardize royalty free resources for real time 3D web content. Their main strategy revolves around Extensible 3D (X3D) International Graphics Standard. A standardization of 3D methods for webpages will help provide a stable environment for 3D applications to grow in future development.

WebGL
WebGL is an open source JavaScript API for creating both 2D and 3D interactive graphics in a web browser. however, because WebGL is a self contained library that works very closely to comply with OpenGL 2.0 and  HTML5 standards, it is not fully compatible with all browsers and has does have minimum hardware requirements. WebGL is becoming more popular with developers looking to make some kind of 3D environment for websites.

A number of Interactive examples of WebGL pages can be found at https://www.chromeexperiments.com/webgl.