Google has just made the official announcement that they are ending the ambitious O3D project. Originally conceived as a cross-platform plugin to bring hardware-accelerated 3D to all browsers, WebGL has made major inroads into that space and has the likes of NVidia, Apple (Safari), Microsoft, and the Khronos group behind it. With that in mind, Google has decided to discontinue the plugin and instead turn O3D into a WebGL abstraction layer.
We did not take this decision lightly. In initial discussions we had about WebGL, we were concerned that JavaScript would be too slow to drive a low-level API like OpenGL and we were convinced that a higher level approach like the O3D scene graph would yield better results. We were also cognizant of the lack of installed OpenGL drivers on many Windows machines, and that this could hamper WebGL’s adoption.
@Lars Mainly because it means the death of any existing web-tools or applications built on O3D.
Without a plugin to view them, they are going to be forced to either :
a) Migrate to the new O3D Abstration layer API … or
b) Migrate to raw WebGL.
From what I saw of O3D in the early days, it’s not that different from WebGL, so I suspect many developers will aim for that.
It mainly seems that Google has decided to kill the project, and re-use the O3D name somewhere else.
“Google Darkens The future of O3D”
“Google has just made the official announcement that they are ending the ambitious O3D project.”
This seems inaccurate — O3D is not ending. The plugin is ending, but the O3D project is migrating to a different platform. O3D can still help bring “hardware-accelerated 3D to all browsers”, just without a plug-in. So why the dark tone?
O3D as an abstraction layer on top of WebGL is very useful. WebGL is pretty low-level, and takes a lot of code just to do a Hello World.