3D For the Interwebs ?
I have heard the promise since about 1990. At the 09 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco The Khronos Group announced their intent to develop a set of open APIs for development of 3D graphics for the internet. They said the action was in response to a request from Mozilla and that Google had expressed interest as well.
The Khronos Group lists about every computer/graphics/media/network type company in the world (except for Adobe & Microsoft, of course) as some kind of member of he organization. This includes that of the Safari browser developer, Apple.
Khronos has handled the development of SGI's OpenGL, created in 1992, since 2006. SGI, of course originally made the VRML viewer, Cosmo Player - got nowhere with it, handed it off to Computer Associates (for some reason) where it continued to go nowhere.
Probably the most successful attempt at web 3D is the perfectly awful Second Life. While there may be a practical application for 3D in your surfing experience, it won't be attractive with a slow delivery of lame graphics and overly complex controls. People like telephones & TVs. Computers and internet speeds have improved vastly since 1992 but the horsepower needed for lush graphics and complex worlds ain't really there. Add to that that most people just lazily use M$oft's Internet Explorer and M$oft will likely never adopt any kind of standard graphic format when they can make their own and use their monopoly status to flood the market with their product. Unlike any other browser in the world, M$oft has dragged it's heels in supporting PNG and, AFAIK, IE is the only browser in the world to have no support for SVG.
Good graphics are crucial to the success of web 3D and that means artists need good tools to create those graphics. Adobe pretty much has the market cornered on that and with their Flash products they really have no reason to support anything that comes out of Khronos. Even if they did, their track record with SVG and Atmosphere doesn't instill a lot of confidence.
Somehow, I think this will just wind up another pipe dream.

Search the 2001 Google Index
www.google.com/search2001.html
Some of the old pages are there under View old version on the Internet Archive
But just the descriptions are pretty funny
Some results:

Strata 3D Pro v3.0 gains AltiVec support

Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan, through his Washington attorney, complained late Monday that Palm Beach officials had not notified him of details of a ...

During a keynote speech where Steve Jobs unveiled the online Apple Store, the then interim CEO lightheartedly threatened that Apple was "coming for Dell. ...

Scitex knows that printing processes evolve. The company makes high-end information systems geared for the image-heavy printing and graphic arts markets

Apple was not the only major player taking the podium at Seybold. Executives from Microsoft, Macromedia, Kodak, and Sun Microsystems participated in the ...

The Image Proof of Deposit Document Processing System (IPOD) brings the advantages of imaging technology to organisations that process machine readable....

Trying to do searches on Google for historic stuff has long been a vexing task. They now have a timeline search function/filter that lets you filter your query by date & then, further drill down into more specific dates that are rated by relevance.
To use it, enter your query, then enter a space and enter "view:timeline"
for example

cincinnati riot view:timeline

pretty sweet