Acrobat 3D- PDF's in Flash

Question

It's in my biggest interest to let my users view my 3d-models using Flash Player, while maintenancing the interactivity. Is this possible to do?
Benefits:
1) "Everybody's got Flash Player installed"
2) You can embed an interactive 3D-model direct into a webpage.
As far as I know, you can't embed a pdf into a webpage like you can with a swf.
- Jon

Answer 1

Displaying a 3D viewport via Flash Player is not going to happen yet. Although FP10 is promoted as having "3D features" it's strictly a 2.5D kernel - there's no internal concept of Z-space, just perspective and rotation arrays to make it look like there is. Dropping a U3D or OBJ into a Flash timeline would be nice, but you'll have to wait.
Meanwhile, Acrobat 9 can do it perfectly happily, and R9 penetration is quite good - not as deep as FP, but it's a different demographic. People who use the Web for CAD-type business will almost certainly have it, but a kid surfing for games may not. It's also extremely simple to handle legacy visitors to a page with embedded 3D PDF content; we've been doing it since 8.5 launched and our server logs currently run at around 65% having R9 on arrival, and 15% installing it and coming back.
There are other 3D browser plugins and OS applets such as Right Hemisphere's Deep View, but in general visitors get the point of installing R9 as they've heard of Adobe. Pushing them to another install, however good and safe it may be, is far harder if they don't recognize the name. You also have the advantage that it's a lot more work to drag your original model out from a PDF, whereas some of the third-party viewers simply push the raw mesh file to the visitor.