This past week the web standards organization Khronos Group (the folks responsible for management of the OpenGL standards) announced a partnership with Mozilla that will aim to create a new open standard for ‘accelerated 3D on the web’.
The announcement generated quite a bit of buzz and commentary in the online graphics community. John Dowdell of Adobe wrote a highly critical blog post on the announcement titled "Standards for thee, but not for me". The crux of John's message seems to be that there are already open standards for Web3D (VRML, X3D) and several open and functional browser-based rendering engines. After reading this post, I could see John's point. What's a standard worth if it can be so easily disregarded? But further investigation into matter showed that what Mozilla is proposing is quite different from these existing standards.
While VRML and X3D provide a common vocabulary and standard schema for structuring Web3D data, the Khronos/Mozilla group will work to standardize the way in which this type of data is delivered via the Web. The current leading idea seems to be an interface based on JavaScript (plugin-less!) that would allow direct access to OpenGL rendering functions. This means that VRML and X3D would remain a viable way to organize and store your data and the new standard would provide a common method for the rendering side of the equation.
A CNet article provides a little more info and points out that Adobe is currently looking at incorporating 3D into their Flash-plugin as well....coincidence?
In the end, I think this partnership sounds like it has great promise. It remains to be seen if and when and results would be seen, but the ideas are solid. N Formation Design has long held that a plugin-less content delivery system is the only way to provide viable Web3D. A common, open, hardware-accelerated standard for this would be huge. We'll hope for the best!
N Formation Design, LLC specializes in creating custom, 3D interactive media for a variety of clients. This blog is a place for us to think out loud about our business and to research topics related to our work.
1 comment:
The thing I find absolutely ridiculous about their working group is that they are charging *students* ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS to become members - and that's for the grand privilege of being able to write some of the code for them, yet have no voting rites. And they charge way more for anybody else. Are they serious??? Since when did open source become such a money grubbing group of Scrooges that only opens its doors to the uber rich?
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