Unlike Unity 3D or Adobe Director, Papervision is not a separate authoring environment but an open source 3D engine made for Flash CS3 and above (using actionscript v3). What's immediately obvious is that, since it uses Flash, most people don't have to download a seperate plugin in order to view the content (chances are you all have browsers capable of playing swf files). Understandably, it's receiving a lot of attention and is probably one of the reasons why Flash 10 will ship with its own 3D engine (though it remains to be seen if the completed API will be as extensive as Papervision's).

This can be interpreted in many different ways, hopefully Adobe have big plans for 3D in Flash but given that such content needs to remain stable (not crashing machines all over the place), it isn't going to support hardware acceleration. Papervision is the same way, it's all software rendered which means that anything more complex than a few spheres slows your computer down to a crawl.

It does have a nice little bundle of features though:

• Shaders
• Bump mapping
• Animations
• Camera control

Click here for a real-time 3D demo

This begs the question that even with all this support, doesn't software rendering make it useless?

I'm still debating this, I've yet to find any really great examples of practical application. It's too slow for games and architectural visualisation, but insofar as interface design is concerned it does have a lot to offer. Planes are pretty quick to render and you can use symbols like movieclips as textures. Below is a video of the engine in action, courtesy of http://www.whitevoid.com

Given that people are asking for more 3D content on the web these days and that attempts are being made to cater to such requests, Adobe might come up with a more direct answer in the future. Though with no standardization in place and no desire to sabotage the stability of the Flash player it may not be any time soon. Adobe already have their work cut out for them with bringing 'Director 3D' up to date.

Read more about Papervision at the wiki or visit the official site.