Mozilla and Google have recently put out proposals for 3D graphics standards for the web. Chris Blizzard of Mozilla has a good summary on the differences between Google’s O3D and Mozilla’s Canvas 3D:
So these two 3D things from Mozilla and Google are pretty different. Not really competitive, either, because they have such different goals. The Google software is a very high level API 3D graphics API and what we’re proposing is more akin to the low level graphics API that those high-level systems are built on.
He makes a great argument for why concise, low-level standards are better than monolithic yet impressive ones.