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Mozilla helps Accelerated 3D on the Web at GDC

By Sean Michael Kerner on March 24, 2009 3:48 PM

From the 'play real games in your web browser' files:

Playing games, real games -- has always meant installing software, or running a dedicated gaming console with a CD/DVD. Sure there are games (usually little Flash things) that can be run inside a browser, but usually the graphics aren't up to snuff. That could be changing thanks to an open effort spearheaded by Mozilla (yes the same people that build Firefox).

Today at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the Khronos Group announced a new in browser effort called, "Accelerated 3D on the Web". The Khronos Group is an industry consortium that develops open standards like OpenGL, that benefits game developers and media developers alike.

The Accelerated 3D on Web working group will be chaired by Mozilla, and is an effort to develop a new royalty-free standard, that could bring us cool 3D gaming graphics over the web direct to our web browsers.

A key part of making the browser into a gaming platform, will be the use of JavaScript to get OpenGL capabilities to users. Once upon a time, getting JavaScript to have the performance characteristics to power full 3D would have been a joke in my opinion, but it's not a joke anymore.

Mozilla, Apple, Google, Opera and Microsoft have all been rolling out new JavaScript engines in their latest browsers that literally change the game.

"The industry has been searching for a way to bring dynamic 3D content to everyone's web browser for many years," said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group in a statement. "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."

I'm not sure this means we'll be playing Halo/Killzone, or other console platform games directly in the browser anytime soon -- but in the long term the Accelerated 3D on Web effort will change the online gaming experience.

Instead of small little online games, we could truly have massively multiplayer online games that users could just log onto from anywhere -- with just their web browser. It's an exciting prospect and it will be interesting to see just how far JavaScript will be able to go.

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