back to article Google, Mozilla back 3D interwebs

Open-standards industry consortium the Khronos Group is forming a working group meant to bring accelerated 3D graphics to the interwebs. Known as Accelerated 3D on Web, the working group was announced on Tuesday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The goal is to create an open, royalty-free standard that will …

COMMENTS

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  1. DZ-Jay

    Great, just what we need

    more purty content on the intertubes. *sigh*

    -dZ.

  2. Jeremy
    Pirate

    Great...

    Now instead of wrangling to get multi-browser compatibility in two dimensions, we're gonna have to do it in three because we all know Microsoft will support this new 'standard' in it's own special way... I can't imagine how much fun that will be.

    Anyway, isn't this exactly what Flash / Silverlight / Monolight / etc are for?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Dead Vulture

    We're not dumb...

    "(application programming interfaces, which are essentially agreed-upon sets of commands that software developers use to communicate with hardware)"

    Yes. We know. Everyone who reads this site knows what an API is.

  4. Ken Hagan Gold badge
    Unhappy

    Porn, games, adverts...

    Are there any worthwhile uses for this, or should I just get squid to block it all?

    When Javascript turned up it was a matter of moments before some twat decided that a short script could achieve the same effect as an HTML <a> tag, and immediately started creating web sites that were bloated, slow and could not be viewed on Internet Explorer except in "pants down, bent over" mode (as anything remotely scripted was for many years on IE).

    Now we face the prospect of that twat's apprentice deciding that the best possible 3D button look can only be achieved by explicitly scripting the animation of a few voxels (or whatever) rather than just saying "button" and letting the user agent get on with it. We're doomed, I tell you! DOOMED!

  5. Mike Flugennock
    Stop

    oh, hot diggety...

    ...as if the flashing, bouncing, wiggling, useless stupid bullshit in _two_ dimensions wasn't bad enough.

    I swear, it's almost enough to drive a guy to drink...and Lynx.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Wow..

    So Google and Mozilla feel left out of the RIA party? With Microsoft (Silverlight) and Sun (JavaFX) already trying to duplicate Adobe's RIA technologies, the competition is already pretty stiff.

    I guess it will force everyone to improve their offerings which can only be good for developers and eventually end-users (hopefully).

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    VRML?

    Didn't they try this with VRML/X3D - www.web3d.org - killed by lack of plugins and the difficulties in making the 3D part connect back to the server?

    There are applications in medical and scientific visualisation, 3d data visualisation, 3d manuals and training, Second life in your browser etc - but they need to get the infrastructure right.

  8. Max

    Ummmm, VRML?

    Has this standard not been around for at least 15 years?

  9. breakfast Silver badge
    Stop

    VRML 2.0?

    We still haven't got far with 2D- I suspect some commingling of CSS and SVG will happen at some point and open a lot of doors for designers and for low-bandwidth pages - and it seems to me like it would be more useful to be able to do that well than worry about three dimensions for now.

    It's not as though we can't download 3D applications if we want them.

    Then again, I'm sure it has potential- after all, look at what a tremendous success VRML was.

  10. DZ-Jay

    Re: Porn, games, adverts...

    LOLCats -- in Three-Dee!

    "Iz in yoor screen, zoomin at yoo"

    "O hai! I can has feel laik Iz ther"

    -dZ.

  11. Jonathan

    Weren't Khronos...

    ... the ones who messed up OpenGL3 by overpromising and underdelivering?

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Finally!

    Now I just need me an Ono-Sendai to jack in and bust some samurai shit in The Black Sun.

  13. davenewman
    Boffin

    VRML

    There already is a standard for 3D web content. It's called VRML and been around for years.

  14. Kerberos
    Flame

    Probably wont work

    This will never really take off for one simple reason: cost.

    It's still fairly expensive and time consuming to put together and maintain a decent flat website of any complexity. As soon as you start requiring 3D designers + programmers to make a simple page you'll push the time/cost investment into silly territory.

    Not that it may not be interesting and maybe even useful, but it will not be adopted to any great degree.

  15. Peter
    Go

    If text you want, go ahead and use Lynx. Please stop whinging.

    I know that multimedia features and animation are often abused in irritating ways on the web.

    However, if the development of web technology were left up to a load of grumpy old men complaining about the very idea that people might be allowed to make anything pretty then life would be rather sadder.

    I hope that this endeavour is successful. There isn't yet a very good option for doing 3d graphics on web pages.

  16. Mark

    Everyone else playing catchup again...

    Opera leads, everyone else follows...

    http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2008/06/05/engineering-seminar

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I hate to say it...

    ...but I can see some uses for this. My company builds motion platforms, and the ability to do, say, an on-site demo showing the way our cuing software works using a model of the platform would be pretty useful, since not a lot of people will bother downloading and installing an app to do the same thing.

    Granted, legit business uses like that may be few and far between, and it might well spawn a thousand horrible "Which spinning cube do I click?" UIs like flash did, but you could say the same about any powerful tool. It'll always be misused by other powerful tools... :P

  18. stuart Thompson
    Jobs Halo

    (untitled)

    I had a word with Steve and he's up for it

  19. Andy Bright
    Thumb Up

    Three Cheers for..

    3D boobies.. wahoooooo finally something that qualifies as Web 2.0..

  20. Steve Roper
    Gates Horns

    @ Jeremy

    You're on the right boat mate, but you've forgotten one small thing. Microsoft already have their own 3D standard different to everyone else's - it's called DirectX. So far from supporting this open standard, Internet Suxplorer will *only* work with DirectX, while Firefox, Opera, Chrome et. al. will only work with OpenGL. The practical upshot will be even worse than the IE-detection and CSS-substitution we web developers now employ; a cross-browser compatible 3D website will need to developed FROM SCRATCH in two completely different formats using completely different applications, with two different sets of geometry files, two different sets of textures, and so on.

    Of course, since we all know that Microsoft can't even remain consistent to their OWN standards from version to version, we will then need 4 different versions of the site and its geometry and textures for each version of Internet Suxplorer in use, plus a fifth version that supports the OpenGL standard.

    Joy. I can't wait. Maybe I'll send a bill to Microsoft for the quadrupling of development time their non-adherence to standards causes!

  21. Colin Barfoot
    Gates Halo

    billy can. not.

    I had a word with Bill and he says he's not going to join in until Google returns his lawnmower.

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