Welcome to the lab.
I have been involved with real-time 3D since university, back in the mid nineties. One of my final year projects was written in POV (persistence of vision) , this was a dos based ray tracer, which used an early form of mark-up language. Very similar to the current 3D xml based export formats such as corda used by a new AS3 library Papervision.
Papervision 2 known as Greatwhite is the most recent (actually still beta) library. This appears finally to be a practical 3D engine for web content. There are no player download requirements, other than flash 9. This was always the problem with earlier real-time 3D players, they generally required a player download and setup before the content could be viewed.
Papervision contains libraries to display, render and map 3D models, or 3D objects like boxes and spheres. Models can be exported from 3DS Max, Maya, or the open source Brender applications. The models need to be optimised as the render engine is no Playstation 3, more like the early Microsoft MMX 3D engine, that I worked with at Dorling Kindersley.
