People have been trying for a long time now to bring 3-D to the world wide web. We have had VRML and Web3D, but nothing really seems to have taken off. The latest 3-D graphics API for web browsers in WebGL. This is being directly implemented in web browsers without the use of plugins. WebGL is managed by the non-profit Khronos Group. Currently WebGL is enabled by default in Firefox 4 beta 7, which is my browser of choice. Today The Chromium Blog has announced that WebGL is now on by default in the latest beta version of Google Chrome. They are not content just to enable it. Instead they have also included three 3-D web applications. The video at the top is a human anatomy explorer called Body Browser. They also have a 3-D earthquake map, and a music visualizer. I was able to load the body browser and earthquake map in FireFox 4 beta 7, but the music visualizer would not load.
WebGL is a 3D graphics API for JavaScript that developers can use to create fully 3D web apps. It is based on the OpenGL ES 2.0 API, which should be familiar to many 3D graphics developers. Google, Mozilla, Apple, Opera and graphics hardware vendors have been working together to standardize WebGL for over a year now, and since the spec is just about final at this point, we wanted to get our implementation out there for feedback.
While you may not find much WebGL content on the web, we expect developers to quickly create a lot of content given the power and familiarity of the API. To inspire developers and give users a taste of the kind of apps they can expect in the near future, we’ve worked with a few talented teams to build a few more 3D web apps:
via : The Chromium Blog
