On Aug 8, 2009, at 7:02 PM, Jeremy Orlow wrote:
On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 2:02 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <m...@apple.com>
wrote:
On Aug 8, 2009, at 11:39 AM, Harry Underwood wrote:
Thanks for the link. Didn't even know that WebGL is being
considered by WebKit.
What Oliver showed you is patches to pretty much fully implement it,
done by an Apple employee. So we're doing more than considering it.
I expect there will be more to announce when the patches land.
But another question, if you don't mind. Is O3D considered as a
technical competitor or conflict with Apple's CSS and SVG
extensions, or should it be considered as such?
We do have some extensions to do 3D transforms with CSS, creating
"2.5D" visuals with flat CSS boxes manipulated in 3D, and fully
integrated with the page content. For example, you can use it to
apply 3D effects to a navigation menu or a video. O3D is much more
about creating full 3D models and scenes, without tight integration
with the Web content. In that respect, O3D is more of a competitor
for WebGL than 3D transforms/transitions.
I'm not personally involved in the WebGL or O3D efforts, but I can
speak to some of this.
I agree that O3D and WebGL are more similar to each other than the
CSS 3D transforms. Both are fairly low level, though they take
fairly different approaches to rendering. O3D is a retained mode
API (somewhat like SVG) whereas WebGL is an immediate mode API (much
like Canvas). In other words, for O3D, you use JavaScript to build
up a scene and transform it between frames. In WebGL you use
JavaScript to explicitly render each frame. The latter gives you
more control but is more limited by the speed of JavaScript and the
WebGL bindings. I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that
all three technologies are actually complementary to each other.
Incidentally, it's my understanding that Google showed off a
prototype version of Chrome running both O3D and WebGL at some
conference last week. It's pretty cool how fast things are moving
with respect to 3D on the web. :-)
It was the OpenGL conference and they showed a working implementation
of WebGL (with some unknown vintage of the current API) at the OpenGL
BOF. It was well received. But they were also showing O3D on the
exhibition floor. So they are apparently pursuing both approaches. As
far as I know they are not attempting to move O3D through any
standards body. So for now it is just a Google experiment.
-----
~Chris
cmar...@apple.com
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