New Google Project to Make 3D Web Apps More Windows-friendly

Posted 03/19/2010 at 5:08pm | by Pulkit Chandna

3

Comments

Print

Announced last year by Mozilla and the Khronos Group, WebGL (Web Graphics Library) is triggered at the development of web apps and pages with hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. But for it to become a favorite with developers, WebGL must circumnavigate the biggest impediment in its path: lack of vendor support for OpenGL as compared to Microsoft's Direct3D graphics API.

Since WebGL depends on the OpenGL graphics API, it is better suited to Linux and OS X as compared to Windows. But Google has just announced a new initiative called Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine, or ANGLE, to “layer WebGL's subset of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API over DirectX 9.0c API calls.” For those not comfortable with the technical argot, ANGLE will help execute WebGL on Windows  systems using DirectX 9.0, and “without having to rely on OpenGL drivers.”

According to Henry Bridge, a product manager at Google, ANGLE will also prove to be useful for those developing applications for mobile and embedded devices. “ANGLE should make it simpler to prototype these applications on Windows, and also gives developers new options for deploying production versions of their code to the desktop,” he wrote on the Chromium Blog.

Image Credit: BlogCdn