A quick, unboring explanation first: these games are not flat images on a 2D canvas. They are rendered live in three dimensions by WebGL, a technology built into every modern browser that talks directly to your graphics card. No Flash, no plugin, no Unity download, no login. The page loads, and a real 3D world draws itself in front of you.
Here is the tour, roughly in order of how big a world you get dropped into.
Sketchbook: the biggest world in the arcade
Sketchbook is a small open island you can drive, sail, and fly across, hopping between a car, a boat, and a plane with no objective at all. It is the clearest example of what "real 3D" buys you over a flat game: you can just turn the camera and look at something from a different angle, because the world actually exists in three dimensions, not just from one fixed viewpoint.
Blizzard Peak: 3D used for a real hazard
Blizzard Peak puts the third dimension to work mechanically, not just visually. The avalanche chute running alongside the main slope is a real lane in 3D space you can choose to enter, not a flat overlay. Depth is part of the risk calculation, not just the scenery.
HexGL and Trail Blitz: 3D at speed
Both racers use their 3D space to sell speed: HexGL's neon canyon has real elevation changes and banking turns, and Trail Blitz's forest circuit uses camera pull-back and motion blur as you accelerate past cruising speed to make the road feel like it is actually rushing at you. We cover both in more depth in our racing games ranking.
The Aviator and T-Rex Run 3D
The Aviator is Codrops' old flight toy, still one of the smoothest pieces of 3D in the arcade, all soft candy-colored sky and gentle banking. T-Rex Run 3D takes Chrome's flat offline dinosaur game and gives it an actual horizon and a voxel body to run through it with, which sounds small until you see it move.
The full 3D browser games shelf has all seven side by side if you want to jump between them.
