Journal 3, September 13

Article link: WebGL OpenGL in the Browser

In these days of increasing competition between web browsers we have witnessed the JavaScript performance wars,increasing compliance with the W3C standards, the advent of tabs for nearly every modern browser and even support for video without flash in the most recent Firefox release. But there is one feature that could make all the other tricks seem like old news. WebGL will allow web browsers to display 3D content accelerated by your graphics card directly in nearly any web page!

There are ways of displaying 3D content in a browser already but they all require a different plugins. For instance flash 10 from adobe can to some degree display 3D content but it has had little uptake, id Games also has its own plugin that allows the integration of their popular game Quake into a web interface called Quakelive that can be played anywhere you have a fast Internet connection free of charge. I have also seen some software 3D done in some extension of HTML but it was quite limited and I haven't found anything related to it since. The drawback to these is there is no open spec for all the browser companies to implement. WebGL is the answer, it gives the browsers a standard to rally around that doesn't require clumsy to install or in some cases bloated plugins.

So besides out of the box support for 3D in at least several browsers (Google Chrome and Firefox and Opera support the standard) what will this mean? For starters it means that many of the small flash games many people enjoy would no longer have to be written in flash but could be written in plain old html/javascript and WebGL which would be even more powerful for developers since it would be faster preforming and have inherently better 3D capabilities versus today's predominately 2D flash games.

The Khronos group who writes the WebGL and the well known OpenGL standard predicts the release of WebGL to happen sometime in the first half of 2010. That quick release schedule is backed up by the fact that the Webkit browser engine used by Apple's safari, Google Chrome and Midori already has at least a partial implementation working.

The possibilities of 3D in the browser are endless from games to more fluid redering of your web mail inbox WebGL with 3D avatars in your chat list. I think WebGL will probably mark the biggest change in the web since Web 2.0. A change this big could change a lot of things people do for instance it may become increasingly less common to go to the store and pick up a video game. Why bother when you can play hundreds on the web?