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Khronos Launches Initiative For Standards-Based 3-D Web Content

Posted by timothy on from the from-the-people-who-brought-you-open-gl dept.

xororand writes "The initiative called 'Accelerated 3D on the web' has been formed by the Khronos consortium with the goal to define an open standard for 3D content on the web, using OpenGL and ECMAscript, as it was suggested by Mozilla developers. 'The Khronos(TM) Group today announced an initiative to create an open, royalty-free standard for bringing accelerated 3D graphics to the Web. In response to a proposal from Mozilla, Khronos has created an "Accelerated 3D on Web" working group that Mozilla has offered to chair. This royalty-free standard will be developed under the proven Khronos development process with a target of a first public release within 12 months.' Unlike previous attempts to establish 3D standards for the web, this one might be actually successful due to the use of existing open standards, and the increasing performance of ECMAscript engines."

5 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. This is awesome! by rackserverdeals · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've been trying to figure out how to get web pages to load slower. There are only so many things you can add to a page before you run out of ideas, and as cool as it is, the falling snow effect looks stupid 3 out of 12 months a year.

    Yeah I know it has real potential for some serious implementations, but we all know that you're just going to have 3d rotating logs, 3d menus and other such junk more than anything else.

    --
    Dual Opteron < $600
    1. Re:This is awesome! by BESTouff · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You can laugh at this, but I'm eagerly awaiting the day were all those flash-based games are replaced by javascript games using that 3D canvas.
      Imagine that ! No silly and unsecure plugin to download, a truely open standard available on smartphones as well as desktops, and fully integrated with the DOM content (i.e. can interect with the rest of the web page, unlike flash which is restrained to its sandbox).

      This is awesome, you're right.

    2. Re:This is awesome! by sixoh1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Cinge? No flinch when that stupid monkey from the banner add starts throwing virtual 3D poop at you.

      Does anything really think that if every browser out there had this capability the advertisers wont stuff this into their adds like popups are used now?

    3. Re:This is awesome! by kripkenstein · · Score: 4, Insightful

      With a ton of intranet apps being developed to run in the browser, why not add this capability?

      Well, in a slight change of topic, one issue with adding this capability is security.

      It seems this is basically a thin wrapper around OpenGL (ES). That means we'd be giving arbitrary code in web pages basically direct access to OpenGL drivers, which opens up an entire new world of potential exploits: OpenGL drivers are big and complicated, and have never really been put in such a position (typical OpenGL apps are programs you download and run, which anyhow already have access to your computer).

  2. Re:I'm being pedantic today, but... by DragonWriter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Pedantic is one thing, just plain wrong is another.

    You can't have 3D content on a 2D surface.

    "Content" is logical, not physical, and therefore this statement is wrong. And the web isn't a 2d surface (or any other kind of surface), so even if the statement was true so far as it goes, it would still be irrelevant to whether there can be 3D content on the Web. And since the human visual system uses a pair of 2D sensors to synthesize a 3-dimensional model of the portion of the universe seen, its pretty clear that you can present as good of a presentation of 3D content as humans can deal with using via 2D images, provided you do it just right. And, of course, you can do 2D projections from a 3D model even with one 2D surface, with quite useful results (and, if you deliver the 3D model to the user agent, which then performs whatever requested manipulations the user wants, with a whole lot less latency than if the server had to generate 2D images from a 3D object model and send them over the wire in response to queries for different views of the same model from the same user agent.)

    When we get holographic displays we'll have 3D content, but until then it's perspective, not 3D.

    You confuse presentation mechanisms with content.