Khronos Launches Initiative For Standards-Based 3-D Web Content 117
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."
This is awesome! (Score:5, 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.
plugins (Score:3, Insightful)
Erm shouldn't fancy stuff like 3d acceleration be handled by plug-ins not browsers? I don't even think putting ogg in the browser was a good idea!
Re:This is awesome! (Score:5, 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.
VRML For the Win! (Score:3, Insightful)
Man, I miss people asking for VRML galleries and stores. The same way I miss getting kicked in the head repeatedly.
Re:This is awesome! (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?
Re:But of course! (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, because standardizing web content has worked so very well thus far. This should take right off and just roll. No problems whatsoever. Yep.
Obviously there has been one particular company working hard to hold back Web standards. That said, between legal scrutiny of those actions and the slow erosion of their Web install share to both alternative browsers and alternative platforms (e.g. smartphones) standards are becoming both more important and more applied.
Tired, TIRED of 3D (Score:4, Insightful)
Went to see Coraline last weekend. Good movie, but the best thing I can say about its use of 3D is that it didn't get in the way. Mostly.
All these idiots who keep pushing 3D media at us. WE DON'T WANT IT. It doesn't make anything "more real". Quite the opposite. Since you can never do it completely right with anything resembling current media, you end up with a lot of half-baked complications (the "foreground" objects in Coraline often look like cardboard cutouts) that make it that much harder to immerse yourself in the movie, the GUI, or whatever.
(When you invent a completely new medium in which 3D makes sense, like those "holodecks" on Star Trek, get back to us.)
And as for GUIs, they make interaction more complicated. The whole point of GUIs is to make interaction simpler. If I want to keep track of a lot of extraneous detail, I'll use a CLI.
I write hardware manuals for a living, and there are some people at our company who want us to start embedding 3D interactive models in the PDF versions of our manuals. If I thought this proposal was going to go anywhere (we don't even have enough resources to do more basic authoring easily) I'd be very noisily opposing it. Lots of extra work, all to make using our manuals a little more difficult. No thanks.
Re:plugins (Score:3, Insightful)
Erm shouldn't fancy stuff like 3d acceleration be handled by plug-ins not browsers?
Uh, why? Just because?
I mean, the browser already does accelerated 2D rendering in the form of CSS-decorated HTML. And SVG+Javascript covers quite a bit of the Flash playbook. So why not go all the way and give it the capability to do generalized, accelerated 2D and 3D rendering? We've already got the shitpile that is Flash... at least by embedding this capability in the browser itself, you get a standard implementation across browsers and platforms. And as a bonus, various elements can interact, unlike, say, Flash which is sandboxed away (I can't even copy a frickin' link out of a Flash "application" easily).
Re:I'm being pedantic today, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pedantic is one thing, just plain wrong is another.
"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.)
You confuse presentation mechanisms with content.
Re:This is awesome! (Score:4, Insightful)
UI Innovation Naysayers (Score:3, Insightful)
Since the dawn of man, every UI innovation has been poo-poo'd by the old guard.
When GUI's came out, people said that it was faster to use old keypunch machines. And perhaps it was, at first, but the operators had to be much more skilled and took longer to train.
When browser-based apps came out, a lot of people said that we're all better off with thick client apps that can have a more responsive UI.
Flash and Javascript, people complain about their misuse. But how they're misused is missing the point compared to the good things they've done in changing the landscape of the web. Examples include Youtube, Google Maps. I realize a lot of people don't want to use Flash or Javascript at all, and that's cool with me. But such people are missing out.
There's a lot of 3D applications in our future. Virtual worlds, learning, exploring, sharing experiences together-- all of those things are best done in 3d. Looking at pictures of the Acropolis [wikipedia.org] is one thing. But to really get a "feel" for it, for how big it is, for what it might have been like to be there, you really get more out of exploring a 3d model. Ideally with a guide or a friend.
There's real benefit in 3d, even though a lot of people won't see it. I won't deny that some applications of it will suck, especially at first. But long term, the web could become a fine standards compliant delivery mechanism for 3d apps.
Re:Mr. Document meet Mr. Hack (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a lot of duct tape crap, I'll admit. But the current system has a lot of pretty solid ideas and systems that work well, too. For example, HTTP, and the general stateless nature of the web works great. Proxies, and caching, and other supporting technologies are actually pretty good or at least work really well.
Ajax sucks and is kludgey. But really I don't even notice, even though I code with it every day. That's because I've got it all abstracted away into super easy to use libraries. Lots of it is really lame, but it doesn't bother me in the slightest, because the tools I use (some I've created, some off the shelf) make it all a snap.
If we were to start from scratch the finished product might be simpler. But there's a real strong ecosystem of powerful tools and infrastructure all built around HTTP. Strange and cobbled together as it may look, it makes for a great foundation to build other things on.
So I wouldn't start from scratch. I'd start with what we've got and get a head start, and spend the extra brainpower or more worthwhile innovation.
Re:This is awesome! (Score:5, 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).
RTFA? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow. This is the most uninformed discussion I've seen in years.
This has nothing to do with markup (VRML, x3D, etc). It is about the browser exposing an opengl API to javascript.
According to TFA, it's Mozilla that is proposing building the functionality into a browser (but it could be any other ecmascript container). Since Mozilla is contributing to the standard (and started the initiative), we should expect this to absorb Canvas:3D (i.e., this is not a redundancy).
This standardization is a Good Thing. Everyone's concerns about advertisers abusing this should be directed towards advertisers, not this totally useful idea. Also, noscript rocks.
To all who think javascript just sucks, you don't know how to use it. Stop using it like it's C.
And if it replaces that leaky, closed, insecure, inaccessible, non-semantic and patent-encumbered plugin that almost killed the Web, awesome. With any luck, it'll kill DirectX too.