A new article in BusinessWeek introduces the 3D-Web idea that's already been heavily discussed in the thick of the online worlds space:

Google, Second Life creator Linden Lab, IBM, and a bevy of additional companies are moving toward the day when you can stroll around a 3D Web--and not just their own sites--using a virtual replica of yourself that you've created. They are working to establish technical standards, open to all programmers, that would allow the entire Internet to become a galaxy of connected virtual worlds.

The article also highlights some challenges to the concept:

For all the flurry of excitement, there's still a lot of skepticism among tech experts about whether companies can agree on standards that would allow an open 3D world to exist. After all, look at the battle still raging over the HDDVD and Blu-ray DVD standards. For now, Second Life, There.com, and other virtual worlds are fenced-in spaces where one company calls all the shots. If a consumer creates an avatar or a company creates a virtual storefront, they're stuck in that site. Avatars can't stroll from an American Apparel store in Second Life to Wells Fargo's (WFC ) stand-alone virtual-world bank... So it could take up to a decade before anything like this becomes mainstream.

Rita Turkowksi, executive director of the Web 3D Consortium, told BusinessWeek that they hope to launch an avatar that can jump between sites in about eighteen months. The article also cited the newly-launched Multiverse Network platform, whose avatars can move from world to world -- but only within Multiverse's own "world browser," which means they can only surf within worlds created with Multiverse's software platform.

It's an informative article that nicely rounds up what the major players are doing in terms of forward-looking in the arena, though it does allow:

Most agree it would not eliminate the Web as we know it. Rather, it will be possible to move back and forth between Web sites and virtual worlds, just as we now switch between reading a news article and watching a video clip on YouTube. For searching or reading text, today's sites work fine and will continue to do so. But a 3D Internet could make possible a virtual version of activities you might do in real life with like-minded people. You could buy tickets to a baseball game on a standard Web site, for instance, but then go to a stadium in a separate virtual world to meet up with your friends and watch the game (at a lower price than the real thing, one hopes).

[Via BusinessWeek]