What's the future for Java 3D?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/741161
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Time ago I read about Java 3D integration into Java FX, the article reported the main Java 3D project as "dead" for rewriting the 3D engine into FX.
Solution
Sun has stated that they are no longer focusing on improvements to the Java3D API. The official announcement is at:
https://java3d.dev.java.net/servlets/NewsItemView?newsItemID=5689 http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=36022
As you can see, Sun itself is shifting their focus to a new 3D scenegraph API that will ultimately be a part of JavaFX.
Otherwise, there are numerous high-quality 3D APIs available for Java (eg, JMonkeyEngine or Ogre3D), or you can always use lowlevel APIs such as JOGL and LWJGL.
OTHER TIPS
Sun Microsystems released Java 3D as a community source project in Summer 2004 and it abandoned it January 29th 2008 (as jsight wrote in his answer above). It released the whole source code under GPL 2 with classpath exception February 28th 2008. The first community version was Java 3D 1.5.2.
Harvey has gone on maintaining it for years. I initiated the port of its JOGL renderer from JOGL 1 to JOGL 2 February 10th 2012 and it has become a project of the JogAmp community. It's still active in 2015. Its public API is frozen, it has remained mostly unchanged. Numerous bugs have been fixed. Big kudos to Harvey and other major contributors :) Java 3D 1.6.0 is available here and the instructions to install it are here.
Java 3D 1.6.0 is reliable but not future proof. It relies on the fixed pipeline, it can't work with OpenGL ES, it doesn't support any forward compatible profile. We only fix the bugs, we won't implement any new feature in it.
There are numerous alternatives including JogAmp's Ardor3D Continuation, JMonkeyEngine, LibGDX, the JavaFX 3D Graphics feature, ... Most major scenegraph APIs use JOGL among others as a mean to access hardware acceleration but you can use it directly if you look for something lower level than Java 3D.
P.S: A new contributor works on Java3D 1.7.0, it will add Android support :)
