Webware

A nascent technology called WebGL for bringing hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the Web is getting a lot closer to reality.

Last week, programmers began building WebGL into Firefox's nightly builds, the developer versions used to test the latest updates to the open-source browser. Also this month, programmers began building WebGL into WebKit, the project that's used in both Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome.

Wolfire Games picked up on the WebKit move and offered a video of WebGL in action.

Overall, the moves stand to accelerate the pace of WebGL development by making it easier to try out. But the technology still has a ways to go before people will be able to play Web-based versions of a 3D software such as first-person shooter video games or Google Earth.

"All of these implementations are going to have some interoperability issues for the next little while, as the spec is still in flux and we're tracking it at different rates, but will hopefully start to stabilize over the next few months," said Vladimir Vukicevic in a blog post.

WebGL is one of a several efforts under way to make Web browsers into a more powerful computing platform, increasingly capable of rivaling what software running natively on a computer can do. Even the company with the most to lose from that direction--Microsoft--is embracing it with a Web-based version of Office.

The WebGL plan emerged in March from Mozilla and the Khronos Group, which oversees the venerable OpenGL standard to let software tap into a computer's hardware-based graphics power . WebGL's roots lie with an earlier Mozilla project called Canvas 3D, a cousin of the present two-dimensional Canvas technology for drawing graphics in Web pages.

Although Google is a WebGL supporter, it's also developing a higher-level 3D graphics technology called O3D for browsers. Google is working on building O3D into Chrome, but the fruits of that labor aren't yet available.

WebGL has a ways to go, as well, but developers eager to give it a whirl should probably start thinking seriously about it.

"The WebGL working group is targeting the first half of 2010 for release of the standard, but implementations will show up before that," said WebGL programmer Mark Steele in August.

Those wanting to try it not only have to download the Firefox nightly build, but also have to specifically enable WebGL through the Firefox "about:config" mechanism. Vukicevic has instructions on his blog.

Departing significantly from what other browsers offer, Google has begun building its O3D plug-in for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics into its Chrome browser.

"The O3D team is working on getting O3D integrated into the Chromium build, and we're close to being able to complete our first step towards integration," said programmer Greg Spencer in a mailing list announcement Wednesday about Chromium, the open-source project that underlies Chrome itself. "I'll be making the Windows build of Chromium be dependent upon building O3D as part of the build process."

By helping to pave the way for high-powered Web-based games, the move furthers Google's ambition to speed the transformation of the Web from a static medium into a foundation for applications. Another piece of the work is Google Native Client, which is designed to let Web applications take advantage of a computer's native processing power.

Click to view sample video of YouTube in 3D

(Credit: YouTube)

A Google employee has a working prototype of what 3D videos would look like on YouTube.

"YouTubePete" said in a YouTube forum thread that he's the developer working on making a stereoscopic player during his "20 percent time" at Google.

The sample video, which was dug up by SearchEngineRoundtable.com, can be found here. I happened to have a pair of amber/blue glasses lying around, and when I finally found the correct mode in the drop down menu to the bottom right of the player, I did indeed see 3D. It was grainy and dark, but it worked.

Pete reiterates that it is just a side project and doesn't seem to be on the agenda for the company. But he is taking feedback if you have suggestions.

Satisfied that its security underpinnings are solid, Google has promoted its open-source Native Client technology to accelerate Web applications out of its research phase and is taking steps to build it into the Chrome Web browser.

"Based on our experience to date, we believe that the basic architecture of our system is sound and the implementation is supportable. So now we are undertaking a number of tasks to transition Native Client from a research technology to a development platform," said Brad Chen, Google's Native Client engineering manager, in a mailing list announcement Wednesday.

Brad Chen, engineering manager of the Google Native Client

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Native Client, called NaCl for short, is a mechanism to run software downloaded over the Web directly on x86 processors such as Intel's Core line. The key motivation is to attain the speed of regular "native" software installed on a computer rather than the much slower JavaScript environment that sophisticated Web sites use today. It's one part of Google's broad effort to evolve the Web from a collection of relatively static sites into foundation for more powerful applications.

Executing native code from the Web is easy--until you start trying to worry about security risks. To this end, Native Client examines software before it runs to block software that takes a variety of prohibited actions, an idea called static analysis, and it runs the software in a protected sandbox.

"We recognized the underlying technology to be ambitious and risky, and felt strongly than a generous measure of public scrutiny was appropriate before we committed to any definite plans," Chen said. Satisfied that Native Client passed muster, Google will remove various security constraints such as the inability to execute Native Client software downloaded from the open Internet, he said.

Native Client was first introduced in December a browser plug-in, but Google doesn't like that approach.

"We recognize that there is well-justified resistance to installing browser plug-ins. For this reason we have a strong preference for delivering Native Client pre-installed or built into the browser, and we'll be focusing on that as our main strategy for delivering Native Client to users," Chen said.

And now we see one reason why Google is interested having a browser of its own available: "Careful readers may have already noticed evidence of integration into Chromium in the Native Client source," Chen said, referring to the open-source project that underlies the Chrome browser.

Google touted Native Client at its Google I/O conference in May, showing off a Web-based photo editor as an example of the processing power the technology offers. Google also is trying to pair Native Client with another company project, O3D, which lets browsers take advantage of hardware to accelerate 3D graphics.

Brad Chen, engineering manager of the Google Native Client

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--Google wants its Native Client technology to be a little more native.

Google Native Client, still highly experimental, lets browsers run program modules natively on an x86 processor for higher performance than with Web programming technologies such as JavaScript or Flash that involve more software layers to process and execute the code. But to use it, there's a significant barrier: people must install a browser plug-in.

However, Google wants to make the technology more broadly accessible in browsers through new technology coming to HTML, the standard used to build Web pages, and at the Google I/O developer conference Thursday demonstrated its work to make that happen.

Specifically, David Sehr, a tech lead for Native Client, showed off Web Workers standard to let Web pages assign different tasks to independent processing "threads," effectively letting a browser walk and chew gum at the same time rather than waiting for one chore to be finished before the next begins. Web workers are one element of the ambitious but still not finalized HTML 5 standard.

Why care? Because today your browser runs software excruciatingly slowly compared to native applications that run on your computer, but Google wants to speed them up tremendously, a move that would add a lot of muscle to its ambition to make Web-based software more competitive.

"We want to be within single-digit percentages of what you can do with the best desktop native code," said Brad Chen, engineering manager of the Google Native Client (NaCl) project in a talk at Google I/O.

Examples of what can be done include decoding video, encrypting data, video game physics engines, and face recognition. More interesting, perhaps, is when Native Client can work in conjunction with another Google browser plug-in, O3D, that lets browsers take advantage of hardware to accelerate 3D graphics.

Google demonstrated a browser-based image editor built with Google Native Client.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

"With O3D, we think we'll be able to enable high-quality games, the kind you're accustomed to seeing on consoles, as well as CAD applications," Chen said.

Although Google is working hard to enable more powerful Web applications, it's not all altruistic. The company has a growing stable of applications including Google Docs, Google Maps, and Gmail that can become much more competitive with desktop technology such as Microsoft Office. For now, though, Google is trying to hammer out Native Client security issues before promoting it more widely among programmers, much less mainstream users.

Sehr said Google's browser, Chrome, will introduce Web Worker support, he hoped within the next couple weeks. Google has been touting HTML 5 features at Google I/O, and Chrome gives Google a way to advance the state of Web application art.

Though other browsers are building in Web worker support, too, for now the technology is rough and certainly not a foundation a Web programmer could expect widespread support for among browsers.

Google plans to support Native Client both through Web Workers and the plug-in, Chen said in an interview. Built-in support in the browser is helpful, but Chen said Web Workers have undesirable limitations for many chores. For example, the plug-in is necessary for applications that require a fast response to user input, he said.

One such example Google showed at the conference was a photo editor. With it, images could be rotated, zoomed, and have colors and tones adjusted with a variety of sliders. There are online photo editors available today, but they typically use Adobe Systems' Flash plug-in.

This fractal graphics demo showed off a forthcoming Chrome ability to access Native Client applications through the HTML 5 Web Worker standard.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Even at the cutting edge of cloud computing, Web-based applications can be frustrating to write and to use.

Spreadsheets can't sort data well, there are lags between mouse clicks and the program's response, graphics look Mickey Mouse rather than lavish. But Google, among the most aggressive cloud computing advocates, is trying to address some of those shortcomings.

The company has released experimental but still very much real software that brings in some of the power of the PC, where people often use Web applications. Google Native Client--first released in 2008 but updated with a new version Thursday--is a browser plug-in for securely running computationally intense software downloaded from a Web site. And on Tuesday, Google released O3D, a plug-in that lets Web-based applications tap into a computer's graphics chip, too.

The projects are rough around the edges, to say the least. Native Client--NaCl for short--is more security research project than usable programming foundation right now, and O3D exists in part to try to accelerate the arrival of some future, not necessarily compatible, standard for building 3D abilities into Web applications.

Google Native Client is shown here running a fractal landscape explorer.

(Credit: Google)

But both fundamentally challenge the idea that Web apps necessarily are stripped-down, feeble counterparts to the software that runs natively on a personal computer, and they come from a company that has engineering skill, a yen for moving activity to the Internet, and search-ad profits that can fund projects that don't immediately or directly make money.

"There are things you can do in desktop apps that you can't do in Web apps. We're working very hard to close that gap, so anything you can do in a desktop application you can do safely and securely from a Web application," said Linus Upson, a Google engineering director.

Updated at 11:20 a.m. with links to the project.

Google on Tuesday released software called O3D to bring accelerated 3D graphics to browsers, a significant effort but not the only one to try to endow Web applications with some of the computing muscle that PC programs can use.

Google's O3D lets browsers show accelerated 3D graphics such as this island scene.

(Credit: Google)

O3D is a browser plug-in for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome that works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, but Google hopes that eventually, the technology will be built directly into browsers. It provides an interface that lets developers' Web-based JavaScript programs tap directly into a computer's graphics chip, which could mean better games and other applications.

Google touted the technology in a blog post. It includes a video demonstration, complete with a soothing voice-over and a spacey ambient-music soundtrack, for those who don't want to install the plug-in.

Search Cube is the latest in a string of search engines that forgoes displaying search results in an easy-to-parse, ordered list, in favor of a whiz-bang 3D interface. It grabs its results from Google and site preview thumbnails from Thumbshots, then combines them in a 3D cube that you can rotate freely either with your mouse or keyboard.

What's clearly missing here are which results are worth clicking on, something you get with Google's search result relevance algorithm. On the flip side (literally), you get to see a lot more results at once, and with a little visual flair.

Where I think this engine could really be useful is in providing a better preview of the source page, along with letting you know how relevant a result it is. As it stands, clicking on any of the results takes you off the engine and into a new tab or window. It would be much simpler to open up a full preview of the page where you could view the content akin to tools like SearchMe.

See also: Viewzi, Pixsy, OSkope, ManagedQ, and RedZee.
Related: Mozilla, graphics group seek to build 3D Web

Here's a quick demo of what it looks like (a higher-quality stream should be live soon):

The newly implemented Captcha method that's based on 3D images.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

I wrote a blog about a new way of creating Captchas by using 3D images that Taylor Hayward, a blogger, came up with and thought it would be really cool when implemented. Now, 3D Captchas seem to have become a reality--however, not from Hayward.

Incidentally, the folks at YUNiTi.com, a social Web site, have been working on the same idea for a few weeks and have implemented the method on their Web site.

The site announced Wednesday that it has created a 3D Captcha method that is unbreakable by current computer technology, yet much easier for humans to identify.

Captchas is short for Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart. This is a way to make sure the input is not generated by a computer.

Similar to Hayward's idea, this new technology relies on our ability to identify objects in 3D instead of using alphanumeric characters. YUNiti's 3D Captcha, however, has three objects in the challenge and extends the list of images to any object, not limiting it to animals as in Hayward's idea. This increases the challenge's level of complication to prevent computers from successfully making the correct guesses.

I tried a new Captcha at the Web site and it worked very well. You just need to click on the placeholders for each object, then you are presented with a list of objects to choose from. After four mouse clicks, I passed the Captcha the very first time.

Marcos Boyington, co-founder and primary software engineer of YUNiTi.com, told CNET News that he and his brother came up with the idea without knowing of Taylor Hayward's method. Boyington believes this was joint discovery of the same concept by people in different parts of the world. He said he is seeking contact with Hayward to talk about collaboration opportunities.

You can try the new Captcha by visiting YUNiTi.com.