Papervision3D was launched by Carlos Ulloa around December 2005; it was made open source by the end of 2006.
It used drawTriangles() to render 3D content fully on the CPU, within Flash Player.
[2] A 2012 book called it the "granddaddy of 3D libraries for Flash" and argued that "There is a simple reason for PaperVision3D's popularity: it is very complete in its execution.
[4] Another 2011 book noted in the section on "3D with Flash" that "Away3D and Alternativa3D are currently the preferred solution for performance and features because they have a more active development community".
[4] Papervision3D was popular between its introduction in 2006 and 2009, but development has stopped since 2009 and it has been superseded by Away3D, which has been adopted by Adobe as the sole 3D rendering engine included within the official Adobe Gaming SDK.