3D on the Web
March 25th, 2009
Yesterday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Mozilla and the Khronos Group (the folks behind the OpenGL family of standards) announced a new initiative to bring accelerated 3D graphics to the web. This is a promising new direction for web applications, and adds to the rich mix of activities in forum such as the W3C and WHATWG to evolve the web platform.
JavaScript performance in all major browsers has shown marked improvements over time, paving the way for it to be used for more sophisticated classes of applications. Many graphics applications, including popular games, leverage hardware acceleration, and subsets of OpenGL (such as OpenGL ES1.1) are already available on smartphones. The initial activity proposal is to consider a simple binding of OpenGL ES2.0 to JavaScript, and exposing that to an HTML5 Canvas context. This is how a 2D drawing context is exposed to the web for use with a JavaScript API; the proposed mechanism is to do this for a 3D context as well. As exciting as this is for the web and for us at Mozilla, it’s worth explaining our choices, and raising some questions.