The Khronos Group revealed this week that it will move forward with its plans to build a new 3D standard for the Web. Khronos, a technology industry consortium that developed OpenGL and a number of other prominent graphical standards, will devise new JavaScript APIs for natively rendering 3D graphics in webpages without requiring browser plugins. The effort is being undertaken in collaboration with Mozilla, Opera, and Google, indicating that it will receive broad support from prominent browser vendors.

Khronos first demonstrated an interest in bringing 3D to the Web back in March when it issued a joint announcement with Mozilla. At roughly the same time, Google was working on its own 3D Web technology called O3D. Google's O3D is a high-level engine that can load and display models. Mozilla's 3D Web prototype takes a very different approach and aims to expose the conventional OpenGL APIs through JavaScript. It was previously unclear how these competing visions would converge into a single standard.

The announcement this week reveals that Khronos intends to adopt Mozilla's approach. The organization has established a WebGL workgroup that will define a JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES 2.0 which can be used to build 3D engines for the Web. Model loading and other functionality will be facilitated by third-party libraries that will sit on top of the underlying OpenGL JavaScript APIs. One example of such a library is C3DL, a JavaScript framework that can load Collada models and perform other high-level tasks. C3DL is being developed by a team at Seneca University using Mozilla's early WebGL prototype.

"The Web has already seen the wide proliferation of compelling 2D graphical applications, and we think 3D is the next step for Firefox," said Mozilla's Arun Ranganathan, chair of the WebGL working group. "We look forward to a new class of 3D-enriched Web applications within Canvas, and for creative synergy between OpenGL developers and Web developers."

Google has committed itself to implementing WebGL, but will also continue developing its own O3D system. Google's view is that JavaScript is still too slow to handle raw OpenGL programming. The search giant is skeptical that WebGL will be able to deliver sufficient performance with real-world 3D usage scenarios. Google software engineer Gregg Tavares expressed his views on this subject on Tuesday in an O3D Google Group discussion thread.

"O3D is not going away. WebGL is a very cool initiative but it has a lot of hurdles to overcome. The direction of WebGL is trying to just expose straight OpenGL ES 2.0 calls to JavaScript. JavaScript is still slow in the large scheme of things," he wrote. "WebGL, being 100% dependent on JavaScript to do an application's scene graph, is going to have serious problems drawing more than a few pieces of geometry at 60hz except in very special cases or on very fast machines."

He also points out that OpenGL ES 2.0 is not ubiquitously supported on common hardware, which means that not every user will be able to view WebGL content. Despite his skepticism, he says that he and others at Google are still enthusiastic about WebGL and hope to make it work. A single team at Google is responsible for implementing both O3D and WebGL, he says, and they are strongly committed to the success of both technologies.

O3D product manager Henry Bridge, who we spoke with about the project back in April, posted a message in the thread to further clarify the nature of Google's plans for 3D. He says that O3D and WebGL are both suited for different kinds of 3D workloads right now and that Google wants to make it easy for developers to use both simultaneously.

Khronos hopes to have the first official public release of the WebGL specification ready for publication in the first half of 2010. The group is encouraging industry stakeholders to participate in the effort and contribute to producing the specifications.