During the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, California, Khronos Group presented the final specification of the standard WebGL 1.0, which is designed to provide hardware accelerated 3D graphics in browsers without the need for plug-ins. Khronos Group industry consortium today released the final version of the specification WebGL 1.0. They offer the possibility to use tools for hardware acceleration of 3D-graphics in browsers with support for HTML5 without using plug-ins. WebGL JavaScript determines binding to OpenGL ES 2.0, allowing you to include 3D-graphics in documents for browsers on any platform that supports industry-standard API OpenGL or OpenGL ES. According to a source, WebGL is supported by major players, including Apple, Google, Mozilla and Opera. New development is already supported in several versions of browsers like Mozilla Firefox 4.0, Google Chrome 9.0, Opera and Apple Mac OS Safari. With WebGL graphics, implemented by means of OpenGL ES 2.0, available at virtually all platforms, where there is a browser – desktop, mobile and embedded systems, according to developer’s specifications.
WebGL 1.0 specification is one of the flagships of Web 3D. This technology is not supported by Internet Explorer 9. The industry consortium, Khronos Group, announced the finalization of the specification Stock WebGL 1.0 . WebGL will help create a JavaScript link to OpenGL ES 2.0 (Open Graphics Library for Embedded Systems) to run 3D graphics directly into the web browser (calculated by the GPU 3D graphics card compatible) and on any platform supporting the standard OpenGL and OpenGL ES.
WebGL leverages web technologies such as the Canvas tag in HTML5 and has received the support of Apple, Google, Mozilla and Opera Software. WebGL is supported in Google Chrome 9, Mozilla Firefox 4, and Opera 11.50 (pre-release) and development versions of Safari. Google offers several experiments with WebGL. It’s also no surprise that the browser side always on Internet Explorer 9 Microsoft is missing. OpenGL gives indeed the “buttons” to Microsoft because of competition with Direct3D (part of DirectX). The announcement comes while Adobe has also lifted the veil on Flash Player 11 whose main feature is the 3D hardware acceleration based depending on the host platform either DirectX or OpenGL. WebGL already has competition.
After the release of the specification standard WebGL 1.0 organization Khronos Group intends to proceed with the development of yet another Web-based Standard – WebCL. The basic idea is very similar to WebGL and is the integration of JavaScript and OpenCL for parallel computing. With the help of WebCL, developers can build web applications that can fully utilize the resources available to the user’s multi-core computer processors and graphics processors. On assurances of Khronos Group, Standard WebCL may be useful for editing photos and video, as well as for the treatment of physical effects in games. Information on the timing of release WebCL has not yet been reported.
