14 DAY TRIAL // WebGL has went from an experimental project to a technology almost ready for production use in just a little over a year and a half. About a year ago to date, the WebGL standard got an official draft spec. The spec is now almost finalized and Google has enabled support for the technology by default in the new Google Chrome 9 beta.
"We’re happy to announce that WebGL is now on by default in Google Chrome’s beta channel, with some shiny new demos to show off what the technology can do," Kenneth Russell, Software Engineer at Google, announced.
"WebGL is a 3D graphics API for JavaScript that developers can use to create fully 3D web apps. It is based on the OpenGL ES 2.0 API, which should be familiar to many 3D graphics developers," he explained.
"Google, Mozilla, Apple, Opera and graphics hardware vendors have been working together to standardize WebGL for over a year now, and since the spec is just about final at this point, we wanted to get our implementation out there for feedback," he added.
Support for WebGL, which enables developers to take full advantage of the graphics hardware on most machines via JavaScript, has been in the works for more than a year since it first landed in experimental form in WebKit. Firefox 4 Beta 7 also has support for WebGL enabled by default.
The premise is simple, access to the GPU from web applications should prove hugely beneficial. It's not just for games or other 'traditional' 3D graphics apps, web designers could do some really cool stuff with a quality 3D graphics implementation.
For now, Google is showcasing several interesting uses of the API, a couple of which we got to see at the Chrome event when the Web Store and Chrome OS were launched.
The Body Browser is a human anatomy explorer built by a team at Google. Besides showcasing WebGL, it's actually a very interesting tool, one that could easily be used in schools.
Another demo is Nine Point Five, a 3D model of the Earth indicating where the most recent and the biggest earthquakes hit. You can check out several more demos over at the WebGL section of Chrome Experiments.