From the conference organizers,
“A new wave of interactive 3D applications rises from the World Wide Web. New technologies are emerging and existing technologies are evolving to enable the third dimension in web browsers. This also leads to the appearance of a new generation of consumers and producers of 3D content in the new Read-Write Web environment.
14th in the series, the Web3D 2009 International Symposium will address this wide range of topics covering 3D hypermedia on the web. The annual Web3D Symposium is a major event, which unites researchers, developers, experimenters, and content creators in a dynamic learning environment. Attendees share and explore methods of using, enhancing, and creating new 3D web and multimedia technologies, such as X3D, VRML, COLLADA, Croquet, MPEG4, Java3D, and Canvas3D. The symposium will also address new trends such as interactive 3D graphics applications on mobile devices.
Authors are invited to submit their work (short or full papers) for review by the international Program Committee. Both research and applications papers are of interest to Web3D 2009. The papers must be innovative and contribute to the advancement of 3D multimedia technologies on the web.”
The Algorithmist 
Déjà vu
http://jerry.c-lab.de/web3d2001/enter.html
X3D. VRML. MPEG4. JAVA 3D. – This press release could have been lifted straight from the 2001 conference.
COLLADA seems to have some traction as a cross platform file format, and Canvas3D sounds interesting. But to be honest, aside from Flash 3D and Unity, i haven’t seen much accessible, popular progress with 3d on the web in the last 8 years – this coming from the perspective of an experienced web/flash designer. I’m glad to see people are still interested in developing an open standard for 3D – as opposed to proprietary – but whatever has been holding back widespread adoption of these (mostly) old technologies needs to be an important focus at this conference. Otherwise we’ll see the same press release in 2019.
Sounds like you should submit a paper on the topic 🙂 You make good points.
regards,
– jim