The reality of a 3D web came that little bit closer to fruition this week with the announcement that Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox web browser, and Google have teamed up with Khronos, the 3D graphics consortium.
Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group spoke at the Game Developers' Conference in San Francisco and announced the consortium's plans for a 'royalty free standard for Accelerated 3D on the web'.
"The industry has been searching for a way to bring dynamic 3D content to everyone's web browser for many years," said Trevett.
"The convergence of increasing JavaScript performance and pervasive access to accelerated OpenGL and OpenGL ES presents a potentially historic opportunity to make open, general purpose 3D capabilities available to web developers and web browsers everywhere.
"We warmly invite any interested company to join Khronos and become involved in this exciting initiative."
3D for a wider audience
This warm invite was quickly snapped up by Mozilla, who originally came up with the 3D web proposal.
"[Mozilla has] been experimenting with bringing 3D capabilities to the web for some time now, in the form of Canvas 3D," said Mozilla's Vladimir Vukićević in his blog.
"This work has been going off and on for the past while, mainly as a side project of mine.
"For a number of reasons, I think now is the time to bring this out into a wider audience, and to figure out what an initial take of 3D on the web should look like."
The time is right for 3D
Google was also excited by the prospect of a 3D web standard, which if successful could bring better videogames through the 'net and pave the way for 3D chatrooms and the like.
"With more and more content moving to the web and JavaScript getting faster every day, the time is right to create an open, general purpose API for accelerated 3D graphics on the web," said Matt Papakipos, Engineering Director at Google.
"Google looks forward to offering its expertise in graphics and web development to this discussion."
Via Internet News
