WebGL draft released...

Yesterday, the Khronos group released a draft Standard for WebGL, a shader-based API for browser-based 3D. So, now that there is a standard for plugin-free 3D, we should see some really amazing web-based 3d apps. Ones that will blow away the Flash based (meaning software rendering) apps built on top of APIs like Papervision3D, Away3D, Sandy 3D, etc.

While Chrome and Firefox already had some capabilities for hardware rendering, a common standard will mean faster app developments. The WebGL page mentions Apple, Mozilla, Google, and Opera as members of the Working Group, noticeably omitting Microsoft.

While I am happy that this will allow web 3d applications to take advantage of 3D hardware, I could see that it could also lead to vastly different experiences across machines. At least the experience with the 3D flash apps was similar from one machine to the next - we could see a much wider performance gap between netbooks and desktops when trying to run on 3D hardware.

I am hoping for a quick and easy way to import Collada files, so some of my data sphere work can be retained (demo embedded in this post, hit the read more link below).

A nice use of browser 3D interactivity, follow this link:

The credits list GreenScan3D, a company which uses LIDAR to generate golf course terrain maps.

The result is a very interactive 3D view of some golf greens.

(via papervision3d blog)