May 6, 2011 09:10 GMT  ·  By

WebGL has a lot of potential and, despite the fact that several modern browsers support the new web standard, the technology hasn't been employed too often in the wild.

Google has been a big promoter of the web 3D graphics technology and it's doing it again with an interesting new project dubbed the WebGL Globe.

WebGL Globe is a tool for displaying data on top of a 3D model of the Earth. Google put together a world population globe and a search volume globe to illustrate a couple of use cases.

Since it's an open source project, anyone can employ it to display any type of data that would be relevant in this form.

But it's not the practical aspect that's the most interesting, the WebGL globe looks spectacular and is one of the best demos of the native web 3D graphics technology to date.

"Today we're sharing a new Chrome Experiment called the WebGL Globe. It’s a simple, open visualization platform for geographic data that runs in WebGL-enabled browsers," Doug Fritz from the Google Data Arts Team wrote.

The project comes from the Google Data Arts Team and is hosted as a Chrome Experiment. The two ways the team chose to illustrate what it can do, the world population and the search volume globes are pretty interesting, but it should be equally interesting to see what others can create using the tool.

The team explained how they managed to make use of WebGL and JavaScript to create the beautiful visualizations while also ensuring that the globe will perform smoothly on most computers.

"The primary challenge of this project was figuring out how to draw several thousand 3D data spikes as quickly and smoothly as possible. To do this, we turned to Three.js, a JavaScript library for building lightweight 3D graphics," Fritz explained.

"The second challenge of the project was animating the globe – we wanted it to be fun for the user to manipulate. Thanks to WebGL, we’re able to display thousands of moving points at high frame rates by using the user’s graphics processing unit (GPU) for 3D computations," he added.

You can check out the world population globe here and the search volume globe is here. You can also check out the projects Chrome Experiments page. Finally, if you want to take a stab at it, the WebGL Globe code is here, offered under an Apache 2.0 license.

Note that the visualization looks and works best in Google Chrome. It works in Mozilla Firefox 4 as well, but it doesn't look very nice. Neither the embedded version or the ones hosted by Google will work in either Internet Explorer or Opera.