Who are you kidding, Rene? Collada IS an intermediate format and X3D has an interchange format. ANY XML is an exchange format if you want to use it for that.

Collada as the single target of translation is a Sony led effort to converge on tools for Sony games. That is the story. It will compete with 3DIF which is now embedded in Adobe Acrobat 7. The market is fractured and there isn't much chance that is going to change. This isn't a story about 'standards' but about competing businesses who use the so-called openness of a semanticless standard, XML, to achieve business goals.

That's fine. It simply means the 3D on the web market is fracturing into sub-markets and there wasn't that much market to fracture.

Yes, both X3D and COLLADA are using XML, and both X3D and COLLADA can represent 3D.
But concluding that COLLADA is just another name for X3D is wrong. There are many important diffecences in the design.

The main difference being that if X3D is designed as the standard 3D format for the web, COLLADA is designed as a intermediate file format in the content pipeline.
In other words, those are compimentary efforts, and it is even better if it is easy to convert COLLADA back and forth in X3D. In an ideal world, data will be available in the COLLADA format, and converted into X3D or other formats that are specifically designed for a given target.
Of course, it is always possible to write exporters from any tool directly into X3D, without using COLLADA. But instead of writting one exporter for each tool, maybe it is better to write one tool to convert from COLLADA, and use the COLLADA exporters/importers provided and supported directly by the tool and middleware vendors.

-- Remi Arnaud
Graphics Architect, SCEA

All of these competitors are being developed collectively. 3DIF has membership, W3DC has membership and so on. Each has a different story for the intent of the format. On examination, Collada is very similar to X3D, so outside the politics of the source, this is a good thing for the XSLT hackers who want libraries of 3D objects.

Industry and initiatives come and go with the evolution of the products. Standards-based content should have a longer lifecycle, and as we do more work with integrated 3D systems (networked objects for, say, command and control systems), the ability to take the objects and move them from the commercial editors such as Maya into non-gaming environments is a big help.

Because for the first time in history, not only all the major 3D content-creation companies (Alias, Discreet, Softimage etc.) and many others in the industry are supporting such a format, but it's being developing collectively!

Why is COLLADA different from other 3D formats?