"The time is right for 3D content to move onto the Web," says Associate Product Manager, Henry Bridge

Google, who recently announced their impressive turnover, on Tuesday unveiled an interesting piece of software, O3D to bring accelerated 3D graphics to browsers, though it seems not to be the first time a company has tried to make one of these 3D web applications utulizing the advantages of the PC games played nowadays. The last one was in the 1990s, whow were called Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), but it did not work out.

What is O3D?

O3D is a plug-in for web browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari that is enabled to work with Windows, Mac and astonishingly, Linux. However, analysts say that in the future Google ideally, would like to be in the position where the application is built in to the web browser giving a program that allows developers to use Web-based JavaScript programs on a graphics card, perfect solution for extreme gamers!

This is such a good step forward that even rival web browser giants, Mozilla want to get in on the act in their effort to build a 3D Web interface, though the two companies are offering different strategies to the revolutionary idea.

Engineering Director Matt Papakipos, also made his comments,

“OpenGL tends to be a lot of code to write, even for something simple, but OpenGL gives you a lot of control.Ours is at a higher level. It takes fewer function calls, so it’s easier to get stuff on the screen.”

“Ultimately, there’s going to be at least two.” Suggesting there will be two pieces of technology right now, SVG and Canvas.

For the gaming world, Papakipos also added:

“If you look at how we use 3D hardware, 20 years ago, it was CAD (computer-aided design). Today, it’s for playing games.We can push it to the wall. There’s not really any difference between native performance and our performance.”

This will be a good step forward for the web industry, as we are in the recession, everyone has been hit hard, but it is how far you can keep going forward with determination and drive which Google are demonstrating with this optimistic view of the 3D industry.