I'm sure you've seen them. A little java or flash applet that let's you view 3d model in your browser, rotate and zoom it. Nothing else. If you've played WoW, you've seen alot of those on various wiki-like pages.
Thing is, I cannot find any. Google results in horrid, undecipherable mess that has mix of sickly expensive "solutions" and some coded-in-a-basement versions that do much more than I need. But I only need a simple little window on my webpage in which you can look at models. And it has to be compatible with something every casual user has installed, flash or java. Or in latter case, at least download needed scripts automatically or even secretly without frightening the end user.
What I don't want at all are solutions which ask for additional add-on or plugin to be installed, such as VRML or O3D.
O3D simple scene viewer (http://o3d.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/simpleviewer/simpleviewer.html) looks perfect, but... install something additional for this? Nah.
Papervision3D... their page looks like someone ate a chinese dictionary and barfed it directly into html (http://blog.papervision3d.org/). I cannot navigate this.
Embed 3D in PDF is last fallback, it works and everyone and their grandmother has acrobat installed, but it doesn't look neither good or quick.
Surely someone has made a simple, user friendly thing by 2011?
Can anyone help?
I don't think this is really what you need. But it might be helpfull anyway:
http://meshbin.com/
It's a site someone has set up where you can upload models and view them in the Unity webplayer.
It looks awesome (love specular, normal, etc maps! although there's no zoom feature) and just as simple and non-frightening as I wanted... but I don't think it's legal to use and maybe limited to Unity model format only.
What I need player for is for portfolio so don't even need so high-class mapping features.
http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/a-javascript-3d-model-viewer-in-your-browser-20110129/
This seems pretty cool, and it works out of the box. I only found it on a cursory google which I imagine you did yourself but maybe my search terms were slightly different.
I've seen that one.
But it's slow as hell and looks quite bad. Compared to Unity viewer, it's like day and night.
This unity thing wants me to install some player as well, so not for me.