Google is out with an open source browser plugin called O3D that provides a JavaScript API for building and displaying accelerated, rich, interactive 3D applications directly within browsers. There is a demo video available here showing surprisingly good 3D graphics running on a Mac, and the plug-in works in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. In this blog post, Google makes clear that it is pushing O3D as a conversation starting point for "an open web standard for 3D graphics." Mozilla is working on open source efforts in the same space, and some surprises could come quickly from these efforts.