3D Graphics For Firefox, Webkit

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.

Comments

Clarification

[Pojut]

Images are described using XML3D, and the browser can natively render the 3D scene.

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

Re:Clarification

[BRock97]

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.

Re:Clarification

[BhaKi]

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.

oh great.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:oh great.

[Steve Max]

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.

No love for VRML

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

Re:No love for VRML

[bbbaldie]

I have "fond" memories of vrml sites, a 14,400 modem, and a 486 slc machine. One thing about it, though, it was peppier than 1995 Java!

Re:No love for VRML

[dingen]

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.

Re:No love for VRML

[Joce640k]

The way I see it: If there was real use/demand for it, it would be here already...

Re:No love for VRML

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

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.

Re:No love for VRML

[vadim_t]

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.

Re:No love for VRML

[PitaBred]

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.

Short answer

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

No.

CPU hungry

[sshock]

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

Re:CPU hungry

[maxwell demon]

Expect to see amazing new exploits using the GPU.

Two word

[Anonymous Coward]

Porn ography.

Call it Cerberus

[rwv]

I'd propose "Cerberus" as the name for their forked version of Firefox that has XML3D rendering capability. Cerberus is is three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades. After all, Hades has lots of fire and the connection between foxes and dogs is tangible (they are both canines, AFAIK).

Re:Call it Cerberus

[Asclepius99]

I'm voting for PerspectivePanda.

Re:Call it Cerberus

[lena_10326]

How about GraphGiraffe? PixelPup? RenderRabbit? TraceTripe?

Re:Calling it Firefox

[phooka.de]

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.

Tech for the future

[muyla]

Maybe this tech will be big when 3d monitors are out... just imagine the pop ups really poping out of your screen :)

Ray tracing vs. Rasterization

[quadelirus]

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.

Re:Ray tracing vs. Rasterization

[Rockoon]

Because rasterization 'with all kinds of ray tracing like effects' is a bitch.

Shadows alone are extremely complicated in a rasterizer, with special cases for self shadowing, for when the camera is within a shadow or not, when something reflective is being rendered, when something refractive is being rendered, and so on and on.

Essentially nobody has EVER made general purpose rasterizer that flawlessly supports shadows in concert with all the other 'ray tracing like effects' and it is likely that nobody ever will, because the problem is more than just non-trivial. There is always another edge case. Games get away with it because they impose restrictions (explicit or implicit) which avoid most of the edge cases that the renderer can't handle.

Even highly developed engines such as Valve's Source Engine still have problems with incorrect shadowing of their own (non-arbitrary) content, and thats in scenes without reflections or refractions complicating the problem. Now factor in that a renderer such as this is supposed to render arbitrary content, and you see the main problem with rasterizers as general purpose photo-realistic renderers is that nobody can do it, in spite of decades of effort.

The reason to use a raytracer is because all the photo-realistic behaviors of light fall right out of it by definition. Adding yet another behavior of light is simple. Shadows, reflection, refraction, global illumination.. its all SIMPLE (tho certainly less efficient.) The problematic "quality" issues raytracers have are trivial in comparison, with the hardest probably being the inherent aliasing of sub-pixel features.

Re:Ray tracing vs. Rasterization

[zeroRenegade]

Hey Man,

RTFact is based on a research paper from the University of Saarland. The paper describes the implementation of a generic real time ray tracing framework with source code in C++. The goal or objective is an interactive real-time ray tracer.

From the different implementations I researched (Manta from MIT, OpenRT, Arauna, RTSL, plus many more), RTFact is by far the most legitimate implementation. There are a million papers out there on interactive ray tracing, but only a few really take into consideration some of the major problems. I played around with OpenRT, but the amount of artifacts and aliasing really take away from the interactive experience. I have not played around with it recently, so maybe they now have an improved adaptive anti-aliasing solution, so my comments may be outdated.

The base code for RTFact is supposed go open source, but I have been waiting around for a long time without even a remote tidbit of information until this post. They actually even went backwards as they removed the paper from public distribution. Whenever it does go open source, it will be posted here.
http://www.rtfact.org/

Now the generic ray tracing api/framework is RTFact, but from the sounds of the article posted above, they are actually integrating the scene graph RTSG into WebKit, which has also been developed by the university of Saarland. This is only speculation and I could be completely wrong.

If you want some info on RTFact, check out:
http://tiny.cc/gHMrW

For info on RTSG, check out:
http://tiny.cc/3ezO8

If you want the original paper, the only link I could find from Google seems to be broken, but it may be due to the servers being overloaded by downloads after the announcement. I have the paper somewhere here on one of my drives, but it would take me a while to find, so if you want me to spend the time looking for it, you would need to give me some incentive by proving to me that you are in fact doing research.

In regards to your question, without a doubt, rasterization will eventually be replaced by ray tracing. Just look at Pixars evolution into photorealism. When the frame rates improve with better hardware for the general public, the framework will begin to be used in game engines, and not just scene graphs. The reasoning is aesthetic as much as it is technical. Ray tracing is truer to the physics of light than rasterization, so even though you can "fake" effects, the graphics will always be more appealing being rendered backwards than forwards. I do numerical simulation (with a background in CS from UW, where my heavy graphics knowledge comes from, plus a few years in real-time simulaton), and the true physics of the problem always gives a better solution than assumptions, approximations, correlations, and correction factors. It is a comment that my prof continually reiterates. For example, caustics will never look as good rastered as they do ray traced, since the ray tracer will map the full motion of the photons.

I could go on for hours, but I will leave it at this....

Re:No thanks

[Briareos]

Ahh, the day that comes...

Believe it or not, it's already landed on trunk - at least for Firefox running on Windows 7.

np: Autechre.ws Webcast (02.03.2010)

Re:Doesn't matter. 3D in the browser is stupid.

[Junta]

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.

Re:Doesn't matter. 3D in the browser is stupid.

[JBMcB]

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.

Re:Gallery?

[maxwell demon]

Ok, it's a video, not an image ...
Found, of course, with Google.
Searching directly on YouTube gives two further results.

Re:Doesn't matter. 3D in the browser is stupid.

[BRock97]

We realized that 3D graphics in the browser were stupid and useless back in 1995...

...and slow! I was there when VRML was landing (just finished high school) and all I saw it used for were virtual rooms were avatars would talk in a 3D IRC like environment. Only big problem back then was we didn't have 3D acceleration and the interface was clunky and painfully slideshow like in speed.

As for uses, I could think of a few and have already started coding them. Instead of loading a PNG or GIF, it is pretty nice to be able to download a float array, be able to display it, and allow a user to interrogate it. Giving a user that kind of capability in the browser while not requiring them to download an application or a browser plugin is pretty darn nice. And while not mainstream, scientific fields could greatly benefit from something like that.

Re:Doesn't matter. 3D in the browser is stupid.

[h3x87]

Flash problem. But 2 days ago Firefox 3.7 Alpha 2 was released with out-of-process plugins. Flash can no longer crash FF.

Eheh

[SmallFurryCreature]

50k? Oh wow. For a "site" that is available around the world, that is pathetic. A dutch only site already does 10k easily. So 50k for the entire world is nothing.

And how many of the people logged in are bots?