Where 3d browser stuff stands

 Posted by (Visited 54409 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , , ,
Jan 152011
 

Been awhile since I posted about how progress is going on this front. Everyone is very excited about HTML5, of course, but particularly with the latest H.264 news, Flash is still going to be pretty widely used. WebGL is going to be in Firefox 4, (basically, the OpenGL ES 2.0 API will be available).

To my eye, the WebGL stuff is behind the Flash stuff in terms of framerate consistency and performance — but it does have all sorts of nifty off-the-shelf integration with Web data on the fly, because it is literally “a 3d web page” made out of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Here’s a video of the “Flight of the Navigator” demo — if you have a WebGL enabled browser, you can actually try it yourself.

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WebGL reaches draft standard form

 Posted by (Visited 7613 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Dec 112009
 

Khronos has announced that its standard for deploying OpenGL in JavaScript has reached “draft standard” — which means that it is inviting comment from developers. There’s still a ways to go:

But don’t hold your breath for Web-based first-person shooters that rival native applications. First, even if 3D is accelerated, there are plenty of other processing and user interface constraints on Web applications. Second, even after WebGL is standardized, it must be built into browsers, people must upgrade to those new versions, and programmers must learn how to support the technology.

With draft standard, 3D Web closer to reality | Deep Tech – CNET News.

That said, all the browser makers except Microsoft are backing the potential new standard (though Google has O3D going as well, of course).

It might also breathe new life into VRML/X3D — there’s efforts afoot to marry the two.