Google announced their O3D plugin for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms a few months ago, and that was all very well and exciting; this will enable advanced 3D effects to be performed directly in the browser. These new 3D standards on the web will be a very exciting new step in technology. Lately, though, Google has also announced that O3D will eventually be integrated into Chrome. In the words of Greg Spencer, a programmer from Google, “The O3D team is working on getting O3D integrated into the Chromium build, and we’re close to being able to complete our first step towards integration. I’ll be making the Windows build of Chromium be dependent upon building O3D as part of the build process.”
3D banner ads!
Since 3D digital graphics and animation are considered a form of vector graphics, I find it interesting that Google and Apple are pushing for their own 3D vector graphics enhancements in their iterations of WebKit. Google’s idea simply builds something (from scratch) akin to Second Life’s LSL into the browser, while Apple simply extends CSS into the area of transforms, transitions, and 3D styling (which, according to Dean Jackson, is to be applied in tandem with the SVG spec to formulate an extensible standard for 3D graphics).
So I wonder if this is a form of competition between the two companies on the same layout platform, as I assume 3D CSS and O3D to compete against each other in purpose.
So we finally managed to standardise video with HTML5 and now we’re going to make the same mistake again with 3D. Great.
So we finally managed to standardise video with HTML5
Excuse me?
Video in HTML5 is far from being a starndar still, the tag is there but the format is not even in discution anymore.
Yes, but various parties are pushing their own de-facto implementations of < video >, the outcome of which will be facilitated by the actions of web developers in the deployment of video presentations in their preferred default codecs and which will be decided by the users’ direction of attention (and revenue) to their preferred sites through their preferred browsers. The same goes with the browsers’ implementations of 3D vector graphics.
Both competitions are involving similar natures of conflict: openness (and FOSS friendliness), extensibility, money allocation towards implementation, intellectual property, scalability, attractiveness, principles compatibility, etc.
I’d say o3d is much more than svg, e.g. what I do now with o3d (display interactive 3d visualization of 3d point clouds) I couldn’t achieve with svg. So I’m currently quite happy with it. A bid of sadness comes from the unavailability for Linux (well, there’s this http://code.google.com/p/o3d/wiki/HowToBuild, but it s*cks big time). Other than that it’s great stuff.
I know that O3D is currently more extensive than normal SVG. It’s that Apple wants to extend their 3D CSS to both HTML and SVG; as in, allow for 3D styling of traditionally-2D SVG (as SVG is already been compatible with 2D CSS for a while now). From the looks of it, Apple’s idea will involve a minimum of JavaScript involvement, or at least they’re trying to relegate JS to something that people and designers would rarely/barely ever encounter in the final outcome of a 3D web design or animation, while Google’s idea is a JavaScript API that can involve greater effort of web developers.
Most recent example with HTML (for WebKit nightly on Leopard): http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9w30t_webkit-css3-transforms-anim… (Video; derived from http://webkit.org/blog/386/3d-transforms/ );
assorted examples with Mozilla Gecko (Firefox 3.5 or higher): http://ajaxian.com/archives/fun-with-3d-css-and-video
Sooo … I’m not by any means an expert in web standards, but why do I get the feeling that after many years of vendor specific extension anarchy, the web was finally converging to standards, just to start diverging lately by the hand of Google and Apple?
There’s nothing wrong with developing new technologies that are not standard. That’s how standards are advanced. Take the canvas tag that originated from apple. They submitted it to the standards committee and it is now part of the official HTML5 spec. But it was originally a proprietary extension.
What’s not cool is when current standards are not implemented correctly OR when standards are not implemented at all, but the same functionality is available from a non-standard means. The first scenario breaks things, the second creates incompatibility. IE has a bad history with both.
When the standard has not finalized you can’t really claim anyone is diverging from it ..
I heard it uses SwiftShader. Its a Pixel shader emulator of sorts.It seems it will help people to use 3D even when they have a pathetic Intel chip.Its from TransGaming.