A nascent technology called WebGL for bringing hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the web is moving closer to reality.
Last week, programmers began building WebGL into Firefox's nightly builds, the developer versions used to test the latest updates to the open-source browser.
Also this month, programmers began building WebGL into WebKit, the project that is used in both Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome.
Wolfire Games picked up on the WebKit move and offered a video of WebGL in action.
Overall, the moves stand to accelerate the pace of WebGL development by making it easier to try out. But the technology still has some way to go before people will be able to play web-based versions of a 3D software such as first-person shooter video games or Google Earth.
"All of these implementations are going to have some interoperability issues for the next little while, as the spec is still in flux and we're tracking it at different rates, but will hopefully start to stabilise over the next few months," said programmer Vladimir Vukićević in a blog post.
WebGL is one of a several efforts underway to make web browsers into a more powerful computing platform, increasingly capable of rivalling what software running natively on a computer can do. Even the company with the most to lose from that direction, Microsoft, is embracing it with a web-based version of Office.
The WebGL plan emerged in March from Mozilla and the Khronos Group, which oversees the OpenGL standard to let software tap into a computer's hardware-based graphics power . WebGL's roots lie with an earlier Mozilla project called Canvas 3D, a cousin of the present two-dimensional Canvas technology for drawing graphics in web pages.
Although Google is a WebGL supporter, it is also developing a higher-level 3D graphics technology called O3D for browsers. Google is working on building O3D into Chrome, but the fruits of that labour are not yet available.
"The WebGL working group is targeting the first half of 2010 for release of the standard, but implementations will show up before that," said WebGL programmer Mark Steele in August.
Those wanting to try it have to download the Firefox nightly build, and also specifically enable WebGL through the Firefox 'about:config' mechanism. Vukićević has instructions on his blog.
Talkback
News no more directX barrier for developers wanting to bring 3d to other formats, especially in the games market one such example is the quake live program still in development with ID software, in which they utilize both the firefox and Internet explorer browsers to deliver a free multiplayer quake 3 hybrid game.
Although still in development and as it stands is constrained to the regular 3d formats, this type of tech could be the perfect test bed for this new up and coming 3d browser standard.
Although it is still early days for this 3d web project the potential it could unlock for the expansion of third party developments, onto other formats other than windows is huge, this could very well be one of the many breaks open source OS's have needed to be able to finally offer a complete rival to windows for the home users, if not also the developer studios.