Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Web Browsers with 3-D Graphics
A Mozilla executive charts the future of Web-based media technologies.
By David Talbot
Already,
the latest Web browsers, including Firefox 3.5, Google's
Chrome,
and Apple's Safari, allow you to play video directly inside them, without the
need for video-player plug-ins. This trend toward media-rich browsers will
continue. The next Firefox browser will be able to play 3-D graphics, said Chris
Blizzard, director of evangelism at the Mozilla Foundation (makers of Firefox) this
morning at Technology Review's annual Emerging
Technologies Conference (EmTech@MIT). With underlying software now able to
run 30 to 40 times faster than in the past, "we are starting to see the
pieces come together," he said. "This is something that is going to be
delivered in Firefox, adding real-time accelerated 3-D rendering to the Web."
Among
other things, this could allow 3-D video games based on common standards to
move to the Web, threatening today's PC-based gaming market. (Google is also
working on adding 3-D graphics to Chrome.) But for such
transformations to happen, a significant fraction of Web users would have to be
using the newest browsers, something Blizzard cautioned could take several years.
"The most depressing thing is that the most widely used browser is still
IE6," he said, referring to Microsoft's Internet Explorer Version 6, which
was released eight years ago and does not support the latest Web technologies.
Blizzard
also demonstrated the kinds of video technologies that Web developers can now easily
build inside browsers--including adding
face-recognition software atop a live video feed and then putting
the recognized person's Twitter feed in a box over his head. This kind of
creativity will become easier, and spread more widely across the Web, with the
wider adoption of open-video standards and looser licensing of proprietary
video archives. In general, rapid advances in browser technologies will allow a
"much richer experience for users on the Web," Blizzard predicted.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology