WebGL – OpenGL for the Web

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WebGL brings plugin-free 3D to the web, implemented right into the browser. Major browser developpers Apple (Safari), Google (Chrome), Mozilla (Firefox), and Opera (Opera) are members of the WebGL Working Group.

WebGL is a cross-platform, royalty-free web standard for a low-level 3D graphics API based on OpenGL ES 2.0, exposed through the HTML5 Canvas element as Document Object Model interfaces.  It stays very close to the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification, with some concessions made for what developers expect out of memory-managed languages such as JavaScript.

WebGL  is developped by the Khronos Group, a not for profit, member-funded consortium focused on the creation of royalty-free open standards for parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. The Khronos Group was founded in January 2000 by a number of leading media-centric companies, including 3Dlabs, ATI, Discreet, Evans & Sutherland, Intel, NVIDIA, SGI and Sun Microsystems.

A guide how to get a WebGL implementation is available at the Khronos wiki website.

The current stable version of the Google Chrome 8 browser can be WebGL enabled by entering about:flags in the address bar and enabling the feature. A better (default) support of WebGL is provided with the Google Chrome Canari browser (the development version 10.0.614.0).

The following links point to websites with useful informations, tutorials, tools and ressources about WebGL :