WebGL: Interwebs 3D tech emerges from puberty

Google. Mozilla. Opera. Apple. Microsoft

By Cade Metz, 3rd March 2011

WebGL – the emerging standard that provides hardware-accelerated 3D inside the browser – has reached the 1.0 milestone.

On Thursday, media-happy standards organization The Khronos Group announced the final 1.0 release of the WebGL specification, which maps JavaScript to the existing OpenGL desktop graphics interface. "We've been working on this for a couple of years, with experimental and provisional implementations," Nvidia's Neil Trevett, the president of The Khronos Group, tells The Register. "But today is a significant milestone, when we have finalized the 1.0 spec and released it publicly, so the browser vendors are able to push ahead to full production.

WebGL is currently supported by the stable version of Google's Chrome browser, Mozilla's Firefox 4 beta, a preview version of Opera, and the nightly builds of WebKit, the basis for Apple's Safari browser. You also find it in Mozilla's Firefox 4 mobile beta for Android and the still-gestating Chrome OS, Google's browser-based operating system for netbooks.

It is not supported by the latest version of Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer 9. Microsoft does hardware acceleration through DirectX on Windows Vista and Windows 7 machines. But Google provides WebGL support inside Internet Explorer via its Chrome Frame plugin, a piece of software that turns a Microsoft browser into a Google browser.

Originally developed at Mozilla, WebGL defines a JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES 2.0, providing 3D inside the browser without plug-ins. To use WebGL, you need not only the appropriate browser, but also a system with OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics hardware and the appropriate drivers.

Windows machines rarely ship with OpenGL. Buyers must install them on their own. But Google has introduced an open source project - known as ANGLE - that lets WebGL tap into Microsoft's DirectX APIs. According to Trevett, other browser vendors are working on similar project. Originally, Google was building a plug-in for web-based 3D, but it has now put its weight firmly behind WebGL. Mountain View has transformed its old O3D plug-in into a JavaScript library that runs atop WebGL. OSD is just one of many authoring tools that support the spec.

In addition to desktops and notebooks, OpenGL is supported by smartphones – including the iPhone and various Android phones – game consoles, media players, and other embedded devices.

On Thursday, Khronos also announced the formation of a working group that will define a WebCL spec – not to be confused with WebGL – for binding JavaScript to the OpenCL standard for parallel computing. WebCL will let browsers tap GPU and multicore-CPU parallel processing. ®

Update: This story has been updated to clarify the situation with OpenGL and Windows machines. Windows machines generally ship with OpenGL hardware, but not OpenGL drivers.

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COMMENTS

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All Reader Comments (8)

Highly Rated

Posted Friday 4th March 2011 10:02 GMT

Ben Liddicott

Ah, downvoted for being politically incorrect?

As opposed to, you know, wrong?

Not leaving your name, coward?

Posted Thursday 3rd March 2011 22:30 GMT

Paul Shirley

OpenGL not rare on Windoze

As far as I can tell OpenGL support is widespread on Windows, certainly every NVidia and ATI/AMD driver has it built it and even Intel's woeful chipsets do a passable imitation. It's been many years since we had to install separate OpenGL over the base graphics drivers. ID saw to that by building so many essential games on OpenGL.

Despite Microsoft's sometimes desperate attempts to kill it, OpenGL 1 & 2 is near universally available. Even if under the hood they sometimes had to layer it over DirectX to sidestep Microsoft ;)

Posted Friday 4th March 2011 15:14 GMT

FoolD

Windows machines rarely ship with OpenGL ... eh ?

All windows desktop OSes (XP and above) do ship with OpenGL - all-be-it using a software renderer (GDI generic implementation) until a proper graphics driver is installed. Windows server OS don't ; but they're not exactly the norm for web surfers.

If you mean rarely ship with a full OpenGL 2.0 implementation then you may be correct (as the generic software renderer is only 1.1 compliant). Even then though the basic OpenGL calls should work, just not post 1.1 extensions (which should degrade gracefully if coded correctly).

If the PC ships with proprietary drivers (which many do) then it will most likely have full hardware accellerated OpenGL (upto 3.x) ready to go out of the box...