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Initial WebGL Support Lands In WebKit
appleprophet writes "WebGL is an upcoming standard from the Khronos Group, the same standards body behind OpenCL and OpenGL ES. It defines the use of OpenGL in websites using the standard canvas element. In other words, websites will be able to render hardware accelerated, 3D graphics natively inside of a web page. In the last week, WebKit, the rendering engine behind Safari and Google Chrome, has added initial support for WebGL, which means it probably won't be too long before Macs and iPhones everywhere get OpenGL web apps. This could have big implications for gaming. HTML5 has steadily been encroaching on desktop applications' territory, but I don't think many people expected browser-based, hardware-accelerated graphics this soon."
Here's a nice summary.
It seems O3D is higher-level, thus allowing more to be handled by the browser, whereas WebGL forces Javascript to handle just about everything.
I'm not sure which one I like better. In theory, I like Javascript handling everything. In practice, I don't know enough about VMs to say whether Javascript could be made to perform well enough.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
This is about Try #4 for 3D on the Web. Web3D was an XML representation of VRML. Unfortunately, the effect of the Web3D consortium was to kill VRML in favor of a vaporware concept.
3D in the browser is done well in Macromedia Shockwave. Try this 3D driving game. The Shockwave player is supposedly available on 58% of PCs. Some versions of Shockwave even had the Havok physics engine, but Macromedia stopped paying Havok for the license and took that out.
The main problem with Shockwave is that it doesn't start as fast as Flash does. Flash has a nice scheme for interleaving the timeline and the asset data, so that playing starts very quickly. At least if the content is authored properly. Also, Shockwave authoring tools are expensive.
About Java 3D, the less said, the better.
The problem with offering OpenGL access to Javascript is that Javascript isn't a good language for fast matrix math. Also, authoring tools will have to be developed. You can't effectively author 3D content in a text editor.