VizWorld.com

The latest update for the 2011 Xperia phones contains one subtle little feature that’s actually a huge one for web developers: Integrated and native support for the WebGL standard. A possible first-step toward unifying the 3d experience on mobile devices, Xperia and Android get the title of being the first to bring it to reality.  Over at SonyEricsson’s website, they have a developer article on how it all works.

In this article, Anders Isberg from Sony Ericsson’s Technology Reseach department explains more about WebGL and what to think of when you develop 3D web applications for touch-enabled devices. If you scroll down, you will also find three WebGL examples that you can browse to from the Android browser, if you have the latest software on your 2011 Xperia™ phone. You can also check out how it looks in the video above.

via Xperia™ phones first to support WebGL™ — Developer World.

Hardware android, mobile, webgl

If you’ve been holding off on learning much about the new WebGL standards, Opera has a nice piece covering just what WebGL can and can’t do, along with some nice examples and technical details.

This is the first in our series of articles about WebGL. The objective of this series is to provide the information and resources you’ll need to get started learning WebGL. In this piece, we will discuss how WebGL works, what you need to create WebGL applications, and what a simple example looks like.

via An introduction to WebGL – Dev.Opera.

Science tutorial, webgl

Last week Microsoft made waves with claims that WebGL was an insecure and dangerous standard that could bring us a whole new level of web-based malware, exposing millions of systems to new threats.  I personally found their claims overblown, but Jon Peddie (as usual) has a great balanced writeup on the real story behind Microsoft’s claims based primarily on a report from Context Security which found two possible problems.  One problem is just a classic Denial of Service, that exposing the video card to the browser makes it easy for someone to simply hang the card.  The more interesting attack, IMO, is this cross-domain glitch:

Context demonstrated that a shader program could implement a loop that could be used to approximately reconstruct an image from another domain—a serious potential security hole. Khronos had previously debated on its open mailing list whether this was a real-world possibility and once the exploit was demonstrated by Context, Khronos worked swiftly with the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) to mandate the CORS spec (Cross Origin Resource Sharing) in both the HTML and WebGL specs to make sure servers have to explicitly allow access to media assets across domains.

So yes, as with any new technology there are a few glitches in the early version that will get ironed out with time and more-eyes.

via GraphicSpeak » WebGL: kill it before it grows?.

Hardware, Science jpr, khronos, microsoft, webgl

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

Science 3d, webgl

Update 8/5: By request from Khronos, I’ve added all the little ™ and ® ‘s.

Last week I posted a rather, well let’s just say “sensational”, article about the coincidental announcement by AMD/ATI of their new OpenGL|ES2.0 Driver for Desktops and Khronos’s announcement of the OpenGL® 4.1 spec which offers full backwards compatability with the OpenGL ES 2.0™ standard.  Most people wouldn’t care about OpenGL ES 2.0™ on the Desktop, as it’s the OpenGL Spec for Embedded Systems like set-top boxes and mobile phones, however the OpenGL ES 2.0™ spec is the foundation of the up-and-coming WebGL spec that promises plugin-free 3D graphics on the internet for all to enjoy.

Currently in the WebGL space, you have about 4 options:

• Download a Plugin.  This is basically what Google started out with, you download a plugin that offers a translation layer between the actual hardware support and the WebGL spec.
• Download an OpenGL ES 2.0™ Driver. This is what AMD/ATI Announced just prior to SIGGRAPH.
• Download an OpenGL® 4.1 Driver. This is what NVidia announced during SIGGRAPH.
• Download a new browser. WebGL is currently supported in some fashion or another in the latest dev releases of Chrome, Safari, and FireFox.

However, each of these has problems.  The whole point of WebGL is to be “plugin-less”, so the first one is out.  This leaves the other three, however, they have hidden issues as well.

Before I continue, many people ask “Why do I need a driver?”, and it’s a valid question.  Right now, without any OpenGL ES 2.0™ driver, you can go download development versions of Safari, Chrome, and FireFox and get WebGL.  It all works just fine, but you’ll notice it works a bit differently in each one.  This is what the driver is for: consistency. With working drivers in place, the visuals will be identical across browsers and hardware, because the rendering is all handled in the Driver, not the Browser.  Currently, browsers have a built-in translation layer that turns the JS-based OpenGL ES 2.0™ commands and turns them into regular OpenGL commands, and some do a better job than others.

Initially, as in the article, I was a bit harsh on ATI for releasing a dedicated OpenGL ES 2.0™ driver and favored NVidia’s announcement of an upcoming OpenGL® 4.1 driver that would encompass the same results.  This way, the user only has 1 driver to manage that in future systems will be installed by default, so the user literally has to do nothing.  Unfortunately, NVidia’s OpenGL4.1 support is limited to only the latest revisions of hardware:

You will need any one of the following Fermi based GPU to get access to the OpenGL® 4.1 and GLSL 4.10 functionality:

• Quadro Plex 7000, Quadro 6000, Quadro 5000, Quadro 5000M, Quadro 4000
• GeForce GTX 480, GeForce GTX 470, GeForce GTX 465, GeForce GTX 460

This means all those people with little GeForceM cards in their laptops are out of luck, as well as anyone with the GTX285 or earlier.  No doubt these cards have the horsepower to handle WebGL, but they’re currently unable to get the drivers necessary.

ATI’s solution is a bit less elegant, but by offering a dedicated driver they open it to all of their hardware, not just the latest and greatest.  Unfortunately, it does return us a bit to the previous world of loading plugins, except you’re loading a system-level driver instead.  However, this opens the world to all those old ATI Rage chipsets in laptops and FirePro’s in the wild, covering the full gamut of users.

In the end, I’m sure NVidia will offer a driver for WebGL to older hardware, but there’s no news on when that will be.   If NVidia lags too far behind, we could find ourselves in a “VRML Situation”, where individual browsers begin to support various extensions in attempts to best utilize the hardware, leading to inconsistencies and incompatibilities we already see with HTML & CSS across browsers.  Hopefully, with a good standards organization in place like Khronos, which VRML didn’t have, we’ll find consistent drivers coming to all platforms soon.

Hardware, Science amd, ati, feature, khronos, nvidia, opengl, webgl

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.

via Chromium Blog: The future of O3D.

Science google, o3d, webgl

WebGL is coming to browsers whether we want it or not, bringing hardware accelerated 3D graphics without the need for Flash or Java.  However, it does rely on functioning OpenGL drivers on the client system.  For most people, this isn’t an issue, but for people running Windows it might.  For those few people who have working DirectX drivers, but no OpenGL drivers, a new project is on the horizon to transparently translate between the two.

The goal of ANGLE is to allow Windows users to seamlessly run WebGL content by translating OpenGL ES 2.0 API calls to DirectX 9 API calls.

Current browser implementations of WebGL depend on having OpenGL 2.0 drivers present to render content, however these drivers are not available on many computers. ANGLE is an early work-in-progress, but when complete, it will enable browsers to run WebGL content without requiring users to find and install new OpenGL drivers.

You may think this is unnecessary, and I’ld agree.  However, people using older windows laptops with Intel integrated graphics chips have no functioning OpenGL driver, but a working DirectX driver.  These systems, while horribly outdated, are very prevalent and widespread.  While ANGLE may serve a niche market, it seems an important (albeit temporary) piece in bringing WebGL to the masses.

via angleproject – Project Hosting on Google Code.

Science angle, webgl

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. CNet has posted an article in Google’s attempt to bring 3-D to the web. As always, there are some problems that need to be overcome.

One hurdle, though, is that WebGL uses the Khronos Group’s OpenGL graphics interface standard, but not all video cards have OpenGL support. Google hopes to sidestep this issue with a new open-source projet that translates the OpenGL commands into the related dialect more common on Windows computers, Microsoft’s Direct3D. The project is called ANGLE, short for Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine,…

You can also find out more about ANGLE on the Chromium blog.

via Google aims for easier 3D Web on Windows | Deep Tech – CNET News.

Graphics google, webgl

Putting 3D on the Web has never been terribly easy, with standards and plugins like VRML constantly changing and resulting in incompatibilities.  Ambiera has released the newest version of the 3D modeling tool ‘CopperCube’ with support for the latest standard WebGL:

Create your scene or import your 3D models into the CopperCube 3D editor, set camera controllers, materials and more, and click “publish”. CopperCube then creates a Flash .SWF file or a WebGL JavaScript/HTML file ready to be published on your website.

Certainly sounds simple.  They offer a free 14-day trial to get your feet wet with, and plenty of demonstrations on their site.

via CopperCube – a 3D edit for Flash, WebGL and Windows.

Graphics 3d, coppercube, software, webgl

If you’re running a WebGL compliant web browser, you can head on over to Shader Toy and interactively build Pixel Shaders in your browser and see the results.  This is all possible thanks to the new WebGL support and enables an incredible level of experimentation and interactivity, directly in the browser.

Unfortunately I’m not near a WebGL browser at the moment. Someone take a Pic and send it to us, and I’ll be happy to include it!

Graphics, Science browser, interactive, shader, webgl