The Khronos Group, in response to a proposal from Mozilla, has announced an initiative to create an open, royalty-free standard for bringing accelerated 3D graphics to the web.
The Khronos "Accelerated 3D on Web" working group, which may be chaired by Mozilla, the creators of the popular Firefox web browser, is slated to begin work on the new project during April; with a planned public release within 12 months. The working group is reported to be considering various approaches including exposing OpenGL and OpenGL ES 2.0 capabilities within an ECMAScript container such as a web browser to enable the development of cross-platform 3D-capable web applications.
"With increasing performance, JavaScript is positioned to be a viable programming language for classes of applications currently written in C and C++," stated a Khronos press release. "Graphics developers targeting large audiences through web applications would be well-served by bringing additional graphics capabilities [to] the web platform, particularly the ability to work with 3D."
According to the group, OpenGL is available on all desktop operating systems, while OpenGL ES is being used by an increasingly wide variety of embedded platforms as their native graphics API.
"As OpenGL is familiar to application developers, the fusion of OpenGL and OpenGL ES capabilities with the web platform holds great promise," the statement added.
"With more and more content moving to the web and JavaScript getting faster every day, the time is right to create an open, general purpose API for accelerated 3D graphics on the web," Google's Engineering Director Matt Papakipos said. "Google looks forward to offering its expertise in graphics and web development to this discussion."
"The industry has been searching for a way to bring dynamic 3D content to everyone's web browser for many years," Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, said. "The convergence of increasing JavaScript performance and pervasive access to accelerated OpenGL and OpenGL ES presents a potentially historic opportunity to make open, general purpose 3D capabilities available to web developers and web browsers everywhere."
"Finally, people are doing more and more on the web, and are coming to expect more from the applications that they use. Web applications already have access to features that have traditionally been reserved for desktop apps, including being able to work while offline, storing data locally, multiple choices for 2D graphics, and native audio and video support," Mozilla's Graphics Team Lead, Vladimir Vukicevic, said. "Adding 3D to this mix ensures that current web apps can experiment with new user experiences, while also enabling new classes of web applications."
"This is a pretty big deal for us and for the web, and is really a reflection of the continued acceleration of open web technology well beyond just the classic HTML and JavaScript that we've seen in the past," Chris Blizzard, Mozilla's director of evangelism, added. "It's our intention to include this as base functionality in the release after Firefox 3.5, assuming all goes well on the standards front."
According to the organization, the Khronos Group is "an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices." Khronos standards include OpenGL, OpenMAX and more.