As some of you may very well know i've been following Papervision 3D very avidly the last 4 or 5 months now.
Recently Flash Player 9.064 (something like that) was released which was actually released almost specifically for the papervision guys. One such update that really effects the future of 3D in the browser (and the web in general) is the full screen mode.
Full screen mode isnt new to this version of the flash player 9, however is adds a level of hardware acceleration, which has never been there before. This lets the flash player use your graphics card to render flash data.
This isnt only significant to Papervision actually. Its significant to web design in general. The big thing here is the Full Screen mode.
In the past websites have ALWAYS been constrained to specific proportions. Back in "the day" it was always 800 x 600 pixels for every website. Any bigger and you'd have to design the site to deal with a scroll bar. Vertical scrollbars were sometimes acceptable, but horizontal scrollbars might as well be a slap in the face to all your users. Once graphics cards became more efficient and capable of displaying higher resolutions the allowable size became 1024 x 768.
Designers have had trouble dealing with browser constraints for ages, but thats rapidly changing.
With the Flash Player 9 you can now initiate the full screen mode. This causes the flash area to take on the entire computer screen.
Usability people would normally have a fit over a web application taking over the screen, but i feel that they will become more accepting in time.
The reason most usability people would have a fit is the past problems with popups. Believe it or not, only a few years ago the world was plagued with pop-up advertisements. Now-days this is relatively extinct as people are starting to use Firefox more often.
Web designers have this agreement saying they will refrain from opening links in another window on a persons system. They would otherwise open these windows so that they can utilize more screen real-estate. They would also often remove toolbars from the browser window, which quickly became very annoying to users (this still goes on, but to much disdain).
Anyhow, back to my observation. I believe that web designers can now design with scalability in mind. For example, they can design for the smallest screen resolution in use, then leave it to the browser to expand from there. This is really only realistic when using flash or fairly advanced javascript to take care of scaling.
The full screen feature is not very intrusive, despite how it sounds. Full screen usually sort of implies intrusive operation. However, Adobe has done well to prevent abusing the system. The full screen effect is very cool and will allow designers more freedom without the worries of pushing users away because their site is hard to use.
Here's one of the first sites to really use the full screen effect well. It also uses papervision 3d, which of course makes it even better. The extra 3rd dimension opens up a whole world of possibilities to web designers.
http://www.neteye.de/
