Google in 3D, Really this time
I thought the April fools prank was rather fun, when Google announced that you could use their browser in 3D. I even poked fun of it in our corporate intranet, announcing our commitment to the entire CADIE project.
It turns out that Google wasn’t really joking. On a newly created blog for their 03D project, developers have created a plug-in that will enable 3D in most browsers. While it is a step away from needing to wear 3D glasses, the move is an interesting one, considering we are not done laughing at the thought of seeing the Internet in 3D.
While I haven’t been following the efforts, somewhere last month, Google announced it was working with the Khronos Group, an open standards group for Media Authoring and Acceleration. Sure enough they just released the API based off the open-source standard that will bring 3D rendering and graphics to major browsers.
While I always enjoy the projects underway in Google Labs, this one may be a little early to become excited over. The community of mainstream Internet users is not ready yet to use 3D to navigate the Internet. While we are not ready to live in a 3D browser, it certainly does offer up some opportunities for development of other applications.
This is attractive is in the eyes of the gaming community, or at least in my eyes as one person in the community. For years I have always ran ahead of some invisible curve of technology, trying to keep hardware up to spec, just so the game that I was playing would run as smooth as possible. That cost has been an expensive one. Keeping behind the pricing curve of hardware, but ahead of the requirements curve of software requirements is a never ending race. For myself, the latest round of console development in the past couple years have been the only reprieve to allow me to ween off the yearly gaming budget, while satisfying my cravings.
Leveraging the graphics in the browser and being able to produce that level of rendering, once reserved for a localize application, Google has opened a door to moving computer gaming closer to a cloud environment. Take that game which you are already addicted to, and move it to a browser. You now make that game available anywhere, on almost any platform, in the same quality that you have at home now. Want to see if you can install or play a particular game? It might not matter what computer you are on, as long as you have a web browser.
Nobody can predict the exact direction Google will take this development, or if there focus is even on the gaming industry. I do know that I am frustrated walking into a store at all after doing all my shopping online. I do not want to re-live that experience in a web browser, so I hope something fun comes out of this development.
