News WebGL brings 3D acceleration to browsers

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2009/08/05/webgl-brings-3d-acceleration-to-browsers/1

 

Scary thought: Even flashier [read: unusable due to over-usage of Flash] web sites.

 

Anything that gets browsers out of the dark ages vis a vis 3d graphics has my full support!

S*D

 

i dread the day that i am all wrinkly and witness some younguns viewing this very page, laughing at how primitive it is!

 

Yep, scary thought. We can look forward to even more complex and impossible to navigate sites in the future.

 

as far as i was aware, flash 10 has support for GPU acceleration anyway?

 

have to upgrade your video card to surf the net every few months when more and more overly complicated/badly coded sites appear.

 

Just as long as they're concentrating on 3D graphics and not trying to take over the world with monsters

 

Have to wonder if direct GPU hardware access represents a security concern.

 

javascript represents a security concern!

 

Holy shades of VRML Batman!

<cynicism style="jokey sarcasm">
Now companies and universities can foist their second life pavilion like visions on us through their websites too.
</cynicism>

 

VRML was awesome! +1 for the old skool reminder

 

They still teach us about VRML in school

 

WebGL? With Javascript? That's going to be slow as a molasses soaked GeForce2 rendering Crysis on a 486sx. So the graphics part is accelerated who cares, the other half (the engine) will run at stupid ass Javascript speed. You can barely make email clients and IM's that work well with Javascript so forget a freaking game engine. Let's see how they handle multicore CPU's with Javascript, or rather totally ignore multicore CPU's. The only thing that's going to come out of this is crappy cell phone quality games that require a Core i7 to run. Flash and Silverlight already provide a far superior platform to this WebGL stuff, and Flash is a piece of crap. What a waste of development time and effort.


PS. At least I can trust that NoScript will block this WebGL.

 

well this looks very promising but we have to wait until next year do'h ><

 

I hate even installing Flash. Yay.

 

OMG. No security concerns there then.

 

extremely limited support. The rendering is done in software, only the compositing is done on the gpu.

I'd expect an actionscript (flash) port very quickly after release as both actionscript and javascript are based on the ECMA-262 spec.

 

Ah the thin client gains yet more weight. Time for the browser to go to the fat farm.

 

Google already has a 3D api for browsers, O3D. And it runs pretty fast. So I would expect WebGL to perform similarly (since O3D uses OpenGl/D3D). No, you couldn't run a AAA game, but indie games you could. Plus, it's not just about games. A site running O3D/WebGL could make use of shaders, and achieve pretty interesting effects.