Lately read a introduction of webgl. Basically what it does is send a list of points to webgl then vertex shaders place them on the screen and fragements shader color the pixel using vertex shader output.
There is a 3d engine three.js which i previously has blog before. Inside the article have some examples. Look at page 44 it is a 3d monster! I believe interactive movie(meaning to say able to control your destination or decision making in a movie) will be the next big think in browser!
Here’s a video of the visualizer in action from the Google I/O 2011 “HTML5: The Wow and the How”-presentation:
Full article
https://gdd11-webgl.appspot.com/