April 23 2009
Google’s 3D on the web vs. Mozilla’s
Mozilla and Google have recently put out proposals for 3D graphics standards for the web. Chris Blizzard of Mozilla has a good summary on the differences between Google’s O3D and Mozilla’s Canvas 3D:
So these two 3D things from Mozilla and Google are pretty different. Not really competitive, either, because they have such different goals. The Google software is a very high level API 3D graphics API and what we’re proposing is more akin to the low level graphics API that those high-level systems are built on.
He makes a great argument for why concise, low-level standards are better than monolithic yet impressive ones.
April 23, 2009
1:54 pm
I didn’t much care for this movie any of the previous times I saw it. I’d prefer not to have to sit through it again.
OpenGL always wins in the end. Even when it lost (to Direct3D), it only lost after the portions of Direct3D that looked exactly like OpenGL had killed and eaten the portions that looked like a scenegraph API (“retained mode”). You’d think people would have worked this out by now and stop trying to come up with standardized scenegraph APIs, it’s not like there aren’t plenty of data points, but apparently not.
April 24, 2009
12:15 am
Thanks for those links Nigel, I didn’t realize the depth of the tale to this point. Mozilla is taking the path well traveled by basically providing an API to OpenGL ES. If SGI and Microsoft couldn’t make high-level 3D graphics APIs successful, apart or together, I’m not sure why Google thinks it can.