WebGL: Up and Running

Foreword

Ken Russell

Chair, WebGL Working Group, the Khronos Group

In the summer of 1996, I had the privilege of doing a summer internship in the Cosmo Software division of Silicon Graphics, Inc., which was developing a Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) player for web browsers. VRML brought interactive 3D graphics to the World Wide Web for the first time. The Web was young, and it was exciting to see 3D integrated into the experience at such an early stage.

VRML unfortunately didn’t gain the broad adoption its supporters had hoped for. From a purely technical standpoint, there were two contributing factors. First, the programmability was limited due to poor performance at the time of the available scripting languages’ virtual machines. This meant that it wasn’t possible to write general-purpose code that affected the 3D scene, inherently limiting the domains to which VRML could be applied. Second, the rendering model was based on the original OpenGL API’s fixed function graphics pipeline. This meant it was not possible to add new kinds of visual effects beyond those that had been designed into the system.

In the intervening 16 years, there have been dramatic advancements in graphics technologies and computer language implementations. The 3D graphics pipeline has become fully programmable, meaning that artists and designers can create lighting and shading effects limited only by their imaginations. Additionally, huge performance increases in the virtual machines for programming ...