The 3D Internet is profound as a communication and commerce medium due to it's potential to enhance both immediate and longterm social and commercial interaction. Certain specific applications, such as rapid collaborative modeling of physical products or advertising replicas of real world places, are immediately enhanced by the interactive 3D nature of these new platforms. In addition, the 3D Internet will create a significant and lasting effect on the form and organization of our online interaction. 3D, both visual and auditory, is how we experience the world. The 3D Internet replicates this basic perspective more completely than previous forms of the Internet. 3D tickles the brain in a way that flat interfaces never will.

The 3D Internet is now being widely adopted through a myriad of platforms solutions, currently without a common standard. The leading providers are experiencing explosive growth numbers in both concurrency metrics as well as total user numbers.

The emerging 3D Internet is experiencing a technologically distinct, yet semantically similar, problem from that currently faced by the World Wide Web: How to deliver contextually relevant ads in a mixed media environment. As alternate media such as images and video begin to dominate, keyword association with text present on a webpage is no longer an option. Existing emerging solutions deal with meta-data and the semantic web search, but the process is currently incomplete.

The emerging 3D Internet also deals with non-text media elements beyond video and images, whose meta-data is sparse at best. In addition, the spatial relationship of the virtual surroundings, and the continuously changing state of the virtual environment, can not be overlooked. Where you are in these virtual worlds, and the nature of the virtual objects around you, is the key additional factor.

The challenge is further compounded by the lack of consistent access within these 3D virtual environments to the existing media resources of the World Wide Web. Streaming video and interactive multimedia delivery solutions are currently a hodgepodge of conflicting applications.