It seems you can’t pick up an A/E/C trade publication these days without seeing something about the accelerating acceptance of 3D development and building information models.

These are some of the organizations and initiatives that are at the forefront of these developments:

buildingSMART alliance

The buildingSMART alliance™ has been established to coordinate the profound constructive changes coming to the fragmented real property industry in North America. The alliance’s goal is open interoperability and full lifecycle implementation of building information models.
http://www.buildingsmartalliance.org/

Center for Integrated Facility Engineering

The CIFE mission is to be the world's premier academic research center for Virtual Design and Construction of Architecture - Engineering - Construction (AEC) industry projects.
Specifically, CIFE objectives include the development and testing of innovative new ways to model, visualize, analyze and evaluate the multidisciplinary performance of design-construction projects, and to increase awareness of the value and costs of Virtual Design and Construction for practitioners and Stanford students.
http://cife.stanford.edu/

Spar Point Research

Spar Point Research LLC is a research firm that investigates new technologies that improve the productivity, quality and safety of work process for creating, modifying and managing engineered products and constructed assets. They have a particular interest in how new 3D metrology, dimensional control and survey technologies impact design quality, construction schedules, manufacturing costs, project safety and operations efficiency.
http://sparllc.com/

Center for the Built Environment

CBE is a place where prominent industry leaders and internationally recognized researchers cooperate to produce substantial, holistic, and far-sighted research on buildings.
Their mission is to improve the design, operation, and environmental quality of buildings by providing timely, unbiased information on building technologies and design techniques.
http://www.cbe.berkeley.edu/index.htm

National Building Information Model Standard Project

NBIMS is a committee of the National Institute for Building Sciences (NIBS) Facility Information Council (FIC). Since 1992 the FIC mission has been to "improve the performance of facilities over their full life-cycle by fostering common and open standards and an integrated life-cycle information model for the A/E/C & FM industry." The NBIMS Committee continues this tradition by knitting together the broadest and deepest constituency ever assembled for the purpose of creating an open National standard for using BIM efficiently to empower building processes.
http://www.facilityinformationcouncil.org/bim/index.php

Whole Building Design Guide

The WBDG is the only web-based portal providing government and industry practitioners with one-stop access to up-to-date information on a wide range of building-related guidance, criteria and technology from a 'whole buildings' perspective. Currently organized into three major categories—Design Guidance, Project Management and Operations & Maintenance—at the heart of the WBDG are Resource Pages, reductive summaries on particular topics.
http://www.wbdg.org/index.php