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3D Graphics For Firefox, Webkit

Posted by kdawson on from the vrml-redux dept.

angry tapir writes "A group of researchers plans to release a version of the Firefox browser that includes the built-in ability to view 3D graphics. They've integrated real-time ray tracing technology, called RT Fact, into Firefox and Webkit. Images are described using XML3D, and the browser can natively render the 3D scene." The browser will be released within a few weeks, the researchers say, and they are checking with the Mozilla Foundation about whether they can call it Firefox.

18 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. oh great. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    so this means that in the near future ill have to have quad sli pci-e cards with 1tb of ram and a few extra powersupplies to render all of the popup/under/over/through ads.

    but really, someone educate me... why would anyone find 3d rendering in a browser useful? its almost certainly not going to be able to compete, quality wise, with any recent high end graphics renderings (lightwave/maya, etc)--- and with modern compression schemes and encoding formats and everyone having broadband, why wouldnt someone just embed a higher quality video into their site instead of rendering 3d inside of the browser?

    i cant just imagine firefox now, instead of consuming 500mb of ram playing some simple facebook games consuming 2gb loading 3d models instead of 2d sprites.

    1. Re:oh great. by Steve+Max · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Sounds very futuristic, really cool. What would be the next step?

      I know: 3D chat rooms! Or even better, chat rooms are sooo 20th century: let's make a 3D social network! You would create your own avatar, purchase a house, meet with friends... It would be like a second life, but online!

      Removing my tongue from my cheek for a second, if that's the usage it will get, I can't see how it would succeed when VRML failed doing the same (albeit slower) 15 years ago.

  2. No love for VRML by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We've had 3D graphics for YEARS in browsers. It is called VRML and it is a standard that has been with us since the early days of graphical browsers.

    But the real question is who in their right mind will develop anything as ephemeral as a web page with this complicated technology? The time investment involved to come out with even the simplest of models is enormous. Maybe not John Pinette enormous, something smaller like Louie Anderson enormous.

    1. Re:No love for VRML by dingen · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Just like Second Life, the 3D web is not something people actually want, but more something which makes sense to old fashioned journalists who write for old fashioned media.

      They think it sounds great. Looking at pretty things instead of reading boring stuff is in their eyes the ultimate evolution of computing. That's why you keep reading this sort of stuff all the time. But it will never stick, because in reality, it's just not very useful.

      --
      Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
    2. Re:No love for VRML by Conspiracy_Of_Doves · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I don't think that the point of 3D graphics in a browser is to build entire websites as 3D environments, but rather to have specialized sections of websites where they are applicable. For instance, fully rotatable views of items that you might purchase. Aside from being cumbersome to program, VRML wasn't nearly good enough to do something like that. This might be, however. I think that this technology, especially combined with the canvas tag, has the potential to do a lot of good for the web.

      --

      Technoli
    3. Re:No love for VRML by vadim_t · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Just like Second Life, the 3D web is not something people actually want

      The 50K people logged in right now would seem to disagree. Right now it's a fairly low activity time, should go up later. And from the inside it seems to be still getting larger.

      They think it sounds great. Looking at pretty things instead of reading boring stuff is in their eyes the ultimate evolution of computing. That's why you keep reading this sort of stuff all the time. But it will never stick, because in reality, it's just not very useful.

      I see it in a different way. Not everything has to be a revolution. Back when there was a lot of news about SL there was a lot of hype for sure, but there must be some use to it, since it didn't die when it stopped getting talked about so much. Some people see no point in SL, that's perfectly fine. I see no point WoW either, but that doesn't make it a failure just because it fails to appeal to every person on the planet.

      I think this will be in the same way. Uses will be found for it. It won't be a revolution that will change every website everywhere. Not everybody has an espresso machine, and not everybody is going to have 3D on their website, but that doesn't mean those aren't useful things.

    4. Re:No love for VRML by PitaBred · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why does the whole web have to be 3D or not? Why can't we just make the parts of it 3D that make sense to make 3D? It's not a hard damn concept.

      --
      My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
  3. CPU hungry by sshock · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Do I really want my CPU to overload while navigating the web?

    1. Re:CPU hungry by maxwell+demon · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Expect to see amazing new exploits using the GPU.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  4. Re:Clarification by BRock97 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Even more confusing, is this meant to compliment WebGL or replace it? While I think it would be neat-o to have real-time ray tracing in the browser, the WebGL working group consists of some big names like Apple, Google, and Mozilla.

    --

    Bryan R.
    The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
  5. Re:Clarification by BhaKi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Does this mean this technology will be used strictly for 3D images/scenes, or when they say 3D are they referring to gaming?

    Obviously and according to TFA, they're referring to 3D images/scenes. Gaming would require, amongst other things, browser-support for raw input devices, (at-least partial) server-side magic for processing interactive events. While these are definitely possible, they're not what this is about.

    --
    The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
  6. Re:Calling it Firefox by phooka.de · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If successful, it wouldn't surprise me to see the Mozilla folks include this feature in a future release of Firefox.

    Heaven forbid, please no!

    We don't need a rendering engine for every arcane formalt ever developed incorparated into a browser that's deployed on millions of desktops. Just remember, each supported protocol adds new complexety, new errors and with this new secutiry-issues that'll lead to exploits, bad press, compromised machines and painful bugfixing.

    Stuff like this should never be part of the browser, it should be an addon.

  7. Doesn't matter. 3D in the browser is stupid. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    We realized that 3D graphics in the browser were stupid and useless back in 1995, when the VRML hype was much like the HTML5 hype is today.

    It's one of those things that sounds fantastic, but in reality there are very few useful applications.

    This is just the 15-20 year cycle we typically see with computing technology. Many of the Firefox developers were born after 1990, so they aren't even aware of the browser experiments and failures before about 2005. Not knowing history, they're doomed to repeat the mistakes of the true innovators.

    1. Re:Doesn't matter. 3D in the browser is stupid. by Junta · · Score: 4, Insightful

      WebGL/RT/HTML5 are not fundamentally stupid. VRML hype mistakenly centered around a 3D navigation model for most of the web replacing 2D textual interaction with some image content, which was stupid.

      However, richer multimedia content is a fact of life now with increased bandwidth. If it were not, then flash wouldn't persist (overuse of flash was a fad that has abated a bit in favor of javascript/css mechanisms, but flash persists for video and games without viable alternatives). Various video streaming sites that are relegated to flash today for games and videos would be freed from Adobe's whims as the embedded video, canvas, and 3d capabilities are expressed in industry standard terms.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    2. Re:Doesn't matter. 3D in the browser is stupid. by JBMcB · · Score: 5, Insightful

      We realized that 3D graphics in the browser were stupid and useless back in 1995, when the VRML hype was much like the HTML5 hype is today.

      There are a few differences.

      VRML was never really an industry standard, it evolved from an SGI project and was adopted by a few other companies. There were competing technologies that seemed better, but were mostly closed. In any case, they required browser plugins that were large, clunky, and crashy.

      At the height of VRML's popularity, there really weren't any standards for desktop 3D acceleration. Getting decent performance from a VRML browser required a pretty fast machine, and the graphics were very crude even then.

      Now we have an industry standard backed by the group in charge of HTML, ridiculously fast 3d hardware on even low end desktops, and, with the modded FireFox and Webkit backends, integration with the codebase.

      This might end up working.

      --
      My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
    3. Re:Doesn't matter. 3D in the browser is stupid. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      How is HTML5 any more of a "standard" that VRML was? It has basically came out of Google, with mixed adoption by a few other companies/organizations (Apple, Opera, Mozilla).

      Microsoft, who like it or not still produces the browsers that represent over 75% of the browser market, really hasn't shown any interest in adopting it. Maybe the W3C will bless HTML5, but that doesn't change the fact that it'll work for only 25% of Web users.

      Regardless, what you've said still doesn't change the fact that this is generally a useless technology. The best we'll get out of it are some games, and these will run like shit anyways because they'll be written using JavaScript. Maybe another virtual world or two (which we already have with Second Life and WoW). Most video operations don't benefit at all from 3D graphics; they inherently need 2D acceleration.

      Like we found in the 1990s with VRML, 3D rendering in the browser is of limited use. It's a novelty that's bound to resurface every 15 years or so, as people forget the experiments and failures of the previous generation of developers.

  8. Ray tracing vs. Rasterization by quadelirus · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why would they choose real time ray tracing over rasterization methods? Rasterization is still much faster and you can achieve all kinds of ray tracing like effects if you want to.

  9. Re:Two word by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Oh. Yeah. OK, now I get it. Up until this moment I couldn't see any possible reason why anyone would want to do this other than to burn some VC money.

    Now I realize this is the next big thing.

    However it won't take off until some lame non-porn apps use it somehow, so we can justify having it installed on our machines. Once that happens, people will use it like crazy monkeys.

    The parent is marked "funny", but I'm completely serious.