Google O3D browser plug-in

At Mediastation one of our specialties is the production of real time 3D content but over the last few years we have experienced difficulty in delivering high polygon real time content to web browsers due to fall in popularity of Shockwave 3D and the lack of a suitable hardware accelerated browser plug-in to replace it.

After Adobe serious failings (far too many to list) of the ever so long awaited Director 11/11.5 up until now we have been no closer in finding a replacement. The only real contender being Unity 3D, but we’re yet to find a project with a client happy for their users to have to install this lesser known plug-in. In fact this year so far all of our web based real time 3D projects have been delivered using Flash 3D technologies such those brought by flash player 10 and third party engines such as Papervision 3D. Whilst this has been used to amazing effect in terms of 3D detail it’s been a step backwards due to the lack of 3D hardware acceleration in flash player.

Enter Google O3D:

http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/

Essentially its java scripted OpenGL, unfortunately the technology is not quite ready for use. The tech demos are reasonable and showing some promising features, but the thing that’s got us excited is in the name – Google! According to keynote speaker Michael Jones at GeoWeb in 2008 Google Earth at the time had 400 million users – that’s more than people in the United States! If Google pushed they could probably have the O3D plug-in installed on most PCs in no time and we certainly feel clients would be much more accepting of a plug-in backed by the mighty Google.

At Mediastaion we always like to stay ahead of the game by being the first to use the latest in multimedia technologies. We all ready have our 3D developers assessing O3Ds capabilities and will be watching this space closely to see if O3D becomes the plug-in we have been waiting for!