WebGL brings 3D acceleration to browsers
The WebGL standard gives browser-based apps access to OpenGL ES 2.0 3D acceleration without the need for a plugin.
As reported over on Electronista, the non-profit standards consortium has revealed a few details about its up-coming WebGL 3D acceleration standard - and it's turning into something that should please gamers no end.
The general principle behind WebGL is to offer a JavaScript binding to the group's OpenGL ES 2.0 system, allowing code run within the browser to access the graphics hardware directly in the same way as a standalone application can. As the technology would rely solely on JavaScript to do the heavy lifting, no browser plugin would be required - and it would be compatible with any browser which supports the scripting language alongside the HTML 5 'Canvas' element.
While there are obvious applications for the technology in web-based gaming, the system offers more than that: a high-quality, fast 3D rendering engine which can operate entirely within the browser could lead to far more impressive interfaces to websites, for instance - and possibly even threaten Adobe's Flash technology as the de facto "make my site pretty" standard.
The WebGL specification - which the Khronos group will be offering royalty-free - has some pretty heavy industry backing, too: the current working group includes graphics giants AMD and Nvidia, along with browser specialists Mozilla and Opera, and mobile manufacturer Ericsson. Google is also a part of the group, pledging support within its Chrome browser for the new standard.
The WebGL technology is due for a public release some time in the first half of next year, with support in both Firefox and Chrome expected - presumably to be followed by alternative browsers once the system has seen enough demand.
Does WebGL sound like your dreams come true, or are you frightened by the thought that all those hideous Flash-only marketing pages will now have access to 3D acceleration? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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Yep, scary thought. We can look forward to even more complex and impossible to navigate sites in the future. :(
<cynicism style="jokey sarcasm">
Now companies and universities can foist their second life pavilion like visions on us through their websites too.
</cynicism>
PS. At least I can trust that NoScript will block this WebGL.
extremely limited support. The rendering is done in software, only the compositing is done on the gpu.
I'd expect an actionscript (flash) port very quickly after release as both actionscript and javascript are based on the ECMA-262 spec.
Google already has a 3D api for browsers, O3D. And it runs pretty fast. So I would expect WebGL to perform similarly (since O3D uses OpenGl/D3D). No, you couldn't run a AAA game, but indie games you could. Plus, it's not just about games. A site running O3D/WebGL could make use of shaders, and achieve pretty interesting effects.
I pity the 56k users.
I still have it at my parent's house... Yes, I can't go to most websites. Remember when you could play TF2 on dial up?
Here is someone who has clearly never run a profiler on a 3-D app. Why don't you try it sometime. You will find that the app is spending about 90% of its cycles in the 3-D code. Which means that the app itself accounts for only 10% of the CPU utilization. Which means that it can be written in a slow interpreted language and it will have little to no effect on the actual performance of the app.
Algorithms like collision detection that consume CPU cycles can be split out from the application, coded in C, and called from the interpreted language.
This has all been done many times before. It will be very nice to have it in the browser.
Anyone in this day and age who still thinks that Javascript is slow, is just kidding themselves. Modern javascript engines are using JIT technology just like java. Again, install a browser with one of these engines and try out demos and benchmarks.
Any fool can write bad slow code in any language. A skilled developer will be able to produce excellent effects.
Your video card has immense capabilities for 2-D compositing and image processing that are only available via the 3-D interface. Crack open an OpenGL book and see.
Especially in the laptop market the most common graphics chip is on-board Intel crap.
lol yeh.. well what I don't like about it- is let's say everyone and thier grandma decides it's a good idea to use the gpu in their scripts.. like the card I have kicks down into low power mode in 2d and kicks up when needed- It's a good feature.. I could see it getting stuck running balls out all the time for this
I could block it I'm sure, but what about the average joe- who's botnet ready.. actually that should be a standard term- botnet ready.. they should be forced to put it on all pre-builts and it comes with a red rubber stamp so they can stamp it on their forehead :o they should probably leave this in the hands of plugins like flash
WebGL for the next few years at least is going to be very very slow - although you get direct access to the opengl functions, doing the number of function calls required to fill the graphics pipeline is a long way off in Javascript at the speed it runs at now.
O3D does some interesting Javascript-specific things to speed up this operation and allows you do create rich 3d applications in Javascript now. You may all cry that we're going to see more irritating spam in our browsers as a result as this, but we're also going to see a quantum leap in the sorts of games that run in browser windows, and potentially some much more immersive websites with pixel shaders generating amazing rollover effects and suchlike.
OMG did you ever tried shaders trough glsl ? One infinite loop, and the only thing to do is pressing the reset button.
What is sarcasm?