Update: Look at the bottom for a response from Google.

If you’ve been anxiously awaiting O3D to come to the masses, making hardware-accelerated 3D Rendering in the browser a reality, then you might be waiting a while longer.  According to a new article from CNet, Google is now pushing “Native Client”, a technology for running x86 software in the browser, into Chromium and intends to pair it with O3D.

Native Client, called NaCl for short, is a mechanism to run software downloaded over the Web directly on x86 processors such as Intel’s Core line. The key motivation is to attain the speed of regular “native” software installed on a computer rather than the much slower JavaScript environment that sophisticated Web sites use today. It’s one part of Google’s broad effort to evolve the Web from a collection of relatively static sites into foundation for more powerful applications.

What does this mean?  Well, it could mean that a standard for O3D has to wait on a standard for Native Client execution to materialize first.  If O3D only works via Native Client execution, it might be a while..

A rebuttal: Henry Bridge, a Native Client developer, responded with the following information.

Using O3D does not and will not require using Native Client, and conversely, using Native Client does not and will not require using O3D. We think the two technologies will be very powerful together, however, we intend to make O3D usable from both Javascript scripts and Native Client binaries.

Google Native Client grows out of research phase | Webware – CNET.

Tags