14 DAY TRIAL // The hype around 3D video has died down somewhat, but there are plenty of 3D TVs and other devices coming out, promising to bring the theater experience your living room, or to your desktop, if you own certain Nvidia hardware and prefer to browse using Firefox 4.
Mozilla, Nvidia and YouTube have teamed up to bring a real 3D experience to your desktop.
"Starting with Firefox 4, WebM videos encoded with 3D data will be displayed in high-quality stereoscopic 3D using NVIDIA 3D Vision hardware," Mozilla's Christopher Blizzard announced.
"There are several thousand 3D videos available today on Youtube. And starting today Youtube will transcode and play these videos into the open WebM format with 3D for use with their HTML5 player," he explained.
"This feature is currently only available with Firefox 4. It’s our hope that other browsers will follow and add support for 3D HTML5 video as well," he added.
It really did take all three companies to make this happen. YouTube already supports 3D videos in several formats and can display them depending on what you use, from a pair of red/cyan glasses to the latest and greatest 3D TV.
Now, you can enjoy those videos if you own Nvidia 3D Vision hardware as well. YouTube has started converting the 3D videos it stores now into WebM making them available via its HTML5 player.
If you want to enable support for your Nvidia setup, you need to visit the dedicated page on YouTube and select the "HTML5 Stereo View" mode.
"We're excited to introduce HTML5 and WebM support to the thousands of 3D videos available on YouTube," Jonathan Huang, 3D Product Manager at YouTube, said in a statement. "By embracing these open standards, Nvidia 3D Vision users now have a great way of experiencing YouTube's library of 3D content."
For now, only Mozilla's Firefox 4 supports 3D videos for WebM, so if you want to make use of the feature you need to be using Firefox. There's no word on if or when Google will start supporting the feature in Chrome, but it's likely that support is coming given that YouTube is involved.