In the latest Platform Preview we support all Canvas element APIs and most Canvas 2D Context APIs and attributes.
Features Partially Implemented
Canvas
globalCompositeOperation
The latest Platform Preview does not include support for the globalCompositeOperation attribute.
DOM Exceptions
The latest Platform Preview does not include support for Canvas 2D Context DOM Exceptions.
drawFocusRing()
The latest Platform Preview does not include support for the drawFocusRing() Focus management API.
This is pretty amazing even though it has been hinted at by other news (previously from AMD). Why should we care what Internet Explorer is up to? Well the dream of standards across web browsers seems to be materializing for html5 and more importantly, canvas 2d.
Even with Silverlight Microsoft has decided to join the party and upgrade the web on some great standards to build even more innovative platforms on top of. Some may see this as a death knell for Silverlight, Flash etc but I do not see it that way. I see <canvas> as a competing interactive technology but many times technologies bind together for a better experience, they also drive one another to innovate.
Much like Silverlight pushed Flash, and Silverlight was created because of Flash, those two technologies brought on canvas 2D and more graphical capabilities for the web in the interactive, game and application space. As javascript execution has sped up so has the graphical capabilities of browsers now. What is not to like about that if you are an interactive developer?
Canvas, Flash, Silverlight are all for the most part still software/CPU accelerated. The question is who will start the hardware acceleration of canvas and competing technologies even further to bring us closer to OpenGL ES/WebGL in the browser?
Ars Technica states that IE9 will have hardware accelerated canvas in addition to SVG but that doesn’t seem to be officially stated anywhere by Microsoft yet that I can find. AMD has hinted at it and previous news about SVG being hardware acclerated. Time will tell and it will be a HUGE boost to the browsers that do, of course we need all of them to do it to be worthwhile for mainstream content.
Ars on the hardware accelerated canvas support:
What does come as a surprise is canvas support. Microsoft has been promoting Internet Explorer 9′s support of SVG, which provides vector graphics capabilities within the Web browser, but thus far has kept quiet when asked if it would support the canvas bitmap graphics specification. Not only is canvas being supported, it is also being hardware accelerated, continuing Microsoft’s efforts to give Web applications the ability to exploit the extensive hardware capabilities of modern PCs.
Of course we should tread carefully here, there is still a big chance that portions of the canvas 2d spec will not be implemented exactly the same or some browser may have missing features much like CSS and javascript evolution. For instance the “most Canvas 2D Context APIs and attributes” is something I hope is addressed in the final IE9. If you are gonna spend the time implementing a standard, do it fully and right, don’t try to break it (an old Microsoft tactic). But this step was needed to again push interactive web technologies to more closely compete with desktop graphic technology which adds some really exciting times ahead.
Another golden ray of hope is ES5 support in IE9. Again Wow!
WebGL is pretty exciting offering browser based OpenGL and hardware rendered graphics. When this becomes mainstream this will change up gaming and interactive on the web immensely. Unity 3D and Flash 3d engines add lots of immersive environments and WebGL will be just as exciting, if all browsers adopt it (canvas/webgl).
At Google, we’re deeply committed to implementing and advancing standards, so as of today, the O3D project is changing direction, evolving from its current plug-in implementation into a JavaScript library that runs on top of WebGL. Users and developers will still be able to download the O3D plug-in and source code for at least one year, but other than a maintenance release, we plan to stop developing O3D as a plug-in and focus on improving WebGL and O3D as a JavaScript library.
About WebGL
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. Developers familiar with OpenGL ES 2.0 will recognize WebGL as a Shader-based API using GLSL, with constructs that are semantically similar to those of the underlying OpenGL ES 2.0 API. 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 brings plugin-free 3D to the web, implemented right into the browser. Major browser vendors Apple (Safari), Google (Chrome), Mozilla (Firefox), and Opera (Opera) are members of the WebGL Working Group. “It feels like, someone’s missin-ing”
UPDATE: Due to retractions it cannot be entirely confirmed that IE9 will support <canvas> of html5 spec. They are the last browser and they must support it for it to be a real, valid solution for 2d animation. GPU supported <canvas> would be a huge innovation but would also most likely kill Silverlight for animation, unless they integrate <canvas>. Standards are such a tough bet, ask Adobe with the ES4 bet. Since standards are so tough to get through and are design by committee many times, plugins still have a huge advantage of changing easily. We’ll keep an eye on IE9 to see if the <canvas> revolution will happen soon or if it will be years off. It will most likely be years off for mainstream at any rate.
Specifically, IE9 will take advantage of the underlying hardware in different ways, both from a visual perspective as well as code execution perspective:
The MSHTML rendering layer has been enhanced to use Direct2D and DirectWrite instead of GDI. Direct2D enables GPU accelerated 2D graphics and text, and allows sub-pixel positioning. In addition, the GPU is used for scaling (bitmaps are mapped to textures), which is ideal for zooming and moving images around the screen. This GPU support translates directly into improved readability of pages, more precise placement of text and images, and smooth scrolling and zooming.
JavaScript performance is greatly improved from older versions of Internet Explorer, and should be competitive if not better than competing browsers. In the past, JavaScript in IE was interpreted and not compiled into native processor instructions. The JavaScript engine now includes a JIT compiler which emits x86 instructions and compiles the code before it runs, resulting in a dramatic performance uplift. Instruction generation can also be tailored to the underlying processor to take full advantage of the underlying platform.
IE9 is more standards compliant than previous versions, with new support for HTML5 elements such as <video>, CSS3 support, and SVG support. All graphic elements will be accelerated on the GPU and will enable hardware accelerated rendering contexts for application development, improving visual display, reducing CPU usage, and improving power usage.
There is no excuse in this age where most people have at least a 32MB cards even on the lowly intel OEM cards to not take some advantage of hardware rendering/acceleration for aspects of web content including video, 2d, games and even 3d.
There are lots of other areas of browsers and tech that is hardware accelerated such as plugins like Unity (and Director waaay before that), video, and new tools like WebGL/O3D. Firefox 3.7 is also aiming for hardware acceleration. This idea of browser graphical elements not just in a plugin or video player being hardware accelerated is something that might spark some very interesting and innovative experiences.
I applaud this effort and hope there is truth in it beyond just a preview that has features cut. I also hope more browsers and plugins start doing the same besides just IE9 and Firefox. This entire blog has pretty much had an underlying hardware rendering/acceleration slant. I have been pushing this for sometime and I believe the time is coming soon that web developers will be equipped with the power that native and game developers have for graphics soon, mainly for applications, games and experiences.
The best news is that IE9 will support html5 and <canvas>, <video> tags and ensures the new functionality that web developers will be able to use. We’ll all have to wait for 2-3 years probably before it is something that is 90% saturated and usable in the mainstream market but it is good to know great times lie ahead.
I can’t believe I just wrote about IE possibly innovating ahead of others.
Electronic Arts is using Unity 3D to develop Tiger Woods Online. The game is currently in beta. It was announced that they were using the engine in June on their blog but only on the reposted version here not the original post where the engine was just deemed “new technology”.
This is a major shift in the game industry and how it is being expanded into online properties that rival or better the console and desktop versions through online communities. Quake Live from id software uses their own system that wraps existing games (originally developed by Gaim Theory then bought by id Software) and instant action technology from garage games that runs instant action. All these systems have provided us browser based triple AAA style gaming fun. It looks like that movement will continue as more and more game companies and publishers see the valid capabilities of Unity 3D to deliver when you need really deeply immersive 3d experiences in the browser. Also other systems like Torque 3D, Quake Live technology and more will be seeing this trend continue when it comes to games online. It is also becoming a choice for online web based 3d MMOs such as Fusion Fall and Marvel Super Hero Squad.
So many cool and useful technologies are unveiled at SIGGRAPH every year, this year at SIGGRAPH 2009 was no different. Khronos Group, behind the new guidance of OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenCL, OpenVG, COLLADA etc, came another big announcement about hardware rendering within the browser. WebGL is now an official standard being developed at Khronos Group to bring javascript control of OpenGL to browsers… Wow!
Ok so this was officially announced at the GDC in March but limited information, but now it has been slated for an official public standard in early 2010. Shortly after the announcement at the GDC we saw Google o3D appear doing exactly that, controlling OpenGL through Javascript in the browser but it was still largely software/harward hybrid rendered. Google, Mozilla, Opera are part of the companies supporting WebGL which is great for browser support, also NVIDIA, AMD and Ericsson are in on it.
Khronos Details WebGL Initiative to Bring Hardware-Accelerated 3D Graphics to the Internet
JavaScript Binding to OpenGL ES 2.0 for Rich 3D Web Graphics without Browser Plugins; Wide industry Support from Major Browser Vendors including Google, Mozilla and Opera; Specification will be Available Royalty-free to all Developers
4th August, 2009 – New Orleans, SIGGRAPH 2009 – The Khronos™ Group, today announced more details on its new WebGL™ working group for enabling hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in Web pages without the need for browser plug-ins. First announced at the Game Developers Conference in March of 2009, the WebGL working group includes many industry leaders such as AMD, Ericsson, Google, Mozilla, NVIDIA and Opera. The WebGL working group is defining a JavaScript binding to OpenGL® ES 2.0 to enable rich 3D graphics within a browser on any platform supporting the OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics standards. The working group is developing the specification to provide content portability across diverse browsers and platforms, including the capability of portable, secure shader programs. WebGL will be a royalty-free standard developed under the proven Khronos development process, with the target of a first public release in first half of 2010. Khronos warmly welcomes any interested company to become a member and participate in the development of the WebGL specification.
Google released O3D this year and there are great strides in 3d within the browser from game engine wrapper technologies such as instant action technology, gaim theory engine (now owned by id Software and runs Quake Live, hardware rendered Unity 3D (and Torque 3D coming soon), and Flash software rendered 3d engines Papervision 3D, Away 3D, Sandy (Sandy also released a haXe version that exports a javascript version) and others. But it looks like the movement is to bring OpenGL to the web as a standard under the name WebGL, this would be great! There would still be lots of times where plugins are better now and in the near future but the path is a good one. Having a software/hardware rendering hybrid like Google O3D for broad video card support (some of the painful older intel cards), or using a plugin like Unity3D, Torque 3D or wrapper technology for bigger engines is a good idea for the time being. But the future is grand in this area.
I think that Google O3D and OpenGL ES success on iPhone games probably combined to get this in motion. OpenGL and very basic video cards are now standard in most machines out there. Unity3D actually published hardware statistics on casual gamers (web-based games) ever so kindly and shows that even though there are some older Intel cards out there, for the most part machines nowadays have a video card capable of supporting at least low-poly 3d and hardware supported 2d rendering in real-time for games, user interfaces and more.
This is exciting news, it appears the movement of the web gaming market is getting much more capable and is accelerating the innovation of hardware accelerating the web.
Google has a few things going for 3d in the browser, not just 3d but hardware rendering in the browser. They previously had native client which allows you to run code via a plugin proxy with a sample running Quake. They also had Lively which was a virtual world plugin that was shut down a few month after it started.
This won’t change anything now as Unity3D, Flash 3D pseudo engines, even Director 3D still are the top choices for games, apps, and interactives that need effects and possibly hardware rendering. But it is interesting that Google is essentially re-entering this debate after ditching on Lively and they must see some benefit to having a discussion about 3d on the web and 3d standards in general. I know they have lots of models and tools with SketchUp and Google 3D warehouse so who knows maybe they will take it over by being standards, open and information based.
What is O3D?
O3D is an open-source web API for creating rich, interactive 3D applications in the browser. This API is shared at an early stage as part of a conversation with the broader developer community about establishing an open web standard for 3D graphics.
Get involved
Download the plug-in (Windows and Mac) and explore the samples to see O3D’s capabilities. Linux users, see these instructions.
One thing is for sure, 3d development is still old school proprietary lock in in most cases. Working with 3d and tools like Maya, 3dsmax and others they have always been very non standard. From file formats to interfaces to even basic movements, all different. The general maths of 3d are the same and so should 3d pipelines. Formats like COLLADA are nice because they are starting to open up 3d pipelines and content creation but COLLADA still has many porting issues. FBX file format is another that is really useful and common making pipelines in Unity 3D, for instance, very nice. But it is owned and run by Autodesk who owns all the 3d apps (Maya, 3dsmax, SGI) and I am a bit leary of that method. But in the end 3d pipelines and rendering will be somewhat standardized and maybe the web will be hardware rendered one day. In most cases it is not needed, but for gaming, immersion, demos and other entertainment it could benefit heavily from a more standardized 3d pipeline and methods.
Making games that integrate content from the web is especially required these days. It is a difficult thing to do within the 3d render because of all the plugins, styling etc that needs to be rendered on a 3d surface. Well Torque3D has a killer feature in that it supports entirely full features browser render on a 3d surface. So now you can integrate html content, flash video etc in your game easily.
You can play content in flash player content easily and have stripped down html but it is limited, you can play videos and have content in Unity3d but it is limited, even larger engines like Unreal 3 have difficulty handling flash and html content. If this is a good implementation Torque3D has a killer feature on their hands! Flash is commonly used as user interface elements and content within games but it can be challenging. This is pretty exciting if it works as advertised. Think of how cool all the little consoles, mini-games and controls in 3d games could be in flash easily.
I have been a garage games torque developer and member since 2003 and worked/bought with each engine they have put out from the old school Torque Engine, to Torque Engine Advanced for various game development projects and now they are throwing in on what appears to be based on their instantaction.com technology but using the Torque3D engine. This is very interesting, they might even have a channel/appstore to release games on instantaction.com?
Unity3D has recently taken my time in the full immersion 3d for the web space, the mono engine that runs the scripting is a huge feature. Coding in C#, Boo and javascript is great, and the pipeline for Unity3D is unmatched.
A bit of history, I have been interested in this since Director introduced 3d in director 8.5 in 2001 (how was that not a major revision I don’t know) and the killer Havok 3d physics engine within it. Way ahead of its time. But Director 3d was extremely limited with w3d (not even a decent blender exporter) and it literally has not advanced since that time in terms of ability to develop better for it and the IDE. It was trapped in this little IDE and quirky Lingo language. They tried to save it with javascript, a valiant effort but it still withered due to lack of openness of development for the player (a mistake they aren’t making with Flash now at Adobe). So making full immersion 3d games was not really ready for the web, Director was notorious at crashing browsers and took way too many broken plugins to get a basic engine.
So I went to mods in HL (quake 2 engine), Unreal and when I realized there was no way me or my friends could foot the license fees of either engine we went to Torque in 2003. It was great, large terrains and highly compact engine because it had to run Tribes with 64 players years before anyone else approached 64 players and arguably still played better than 64 player fps now. It was affordable. I have been interested in the movements to make torque an active x control in 2005/6 and Think Tanks did just that. It was very nice, I thought soon after it would be everywhere. But it has taken until now and a new engine called Torque3D before this has been realized years later. This is hard stuff to get right creating a plugin that works cross browser and performs well (browsers had to catch up as well). The culmination of that technology progression has happened and 3d on the web for game development appears to be bigtime in 2009.
Unity3D meanwhile since 2005-6 has gotten it nearly all right so far for a few years now, especially the pipeline and the webplayer. Torque has always had an poor pipeline, not as bad as writing your own engine from scratch and all the tools but in the early days pretty close. Proprietary formats like dts for models made finding the right exporter tasking. There were just so many walls in what was supposed to be a pipeline, largely due to support for formats that were small enough for slower networks and machines of the past. Unity3D gets all this right from the start, pipeline is not an issue. Torque3D seems to address this with their new tools, support for Collada, but unfortunately still scripted with TorqueScript. If Torque3D could wire in Mono and the capability to code in Javascript, C#, Boo or other Mono languages this would have been cool, or at least a semi-standard scripting language like Javascript, Python etc that would be great. TorqueScript was a big feature and UnrealScript is very similar in how it interacts with the engine, but these days we want standard languages that have engine features built in. Maybe this will happen down the road, but the format support is very nice.
For 3d, prior to Unity3D, the web was still owned by Director but that has changed in the last few years. It won me over for immersive 3d games that are web capable and able to port to other platforms and markets. Casual is still done with Flash and mobile space is targeting iphone. Unity3D can run on web, iPhone, Wii, desktop. Torque3D can run on web and also has paths to desktop, iPhone, Wii, XBOX360. You see what is happening here? It is very cool indeed. No doubt the competition in this area is getting to a point where some good innovation and happenings are taking place, what are you going to do with it?
Here is a video with more information on Silverlight 3 Beta features that are matches of the latest Flash killer features in pixel shaders, 3d planes (ability to create pseudo-3d engines like papervision3d), local saving, pixel operations/bitmap handling, local messaging (silverlight to silverlight – like localconnection), out of browser desktop running ability of SL3, SEO and search indexing capabilities / deep linking navigation and more.
Video of the features of SL3 Beta, Demos, at a Slow Pace from #mix09
A few points after the video and taking a tour of the features.
The pixel shaders are written in HLSL (shader 2), however they are compiled to byte code and do not currently use the gpu for rendering. While the pixel shaders are very cool and the language to write them is standard pretty much for shaders in HLSL shader model 2 DirectX-based (the other is GLSL OpenGL based) they have not allowed this byte code to run on the GPU… yet. Here Flash and Pixel Bender actually are ahead there.
Although there are 3d planes which is very exciting, no good pseudo 3d engine exists yet matching the 3 in flash (papervision3d, away3d, sandy). When SL3 comes out I am sure we will see a few emerge or build them ourselves because this iteration of SL3 looks pretty fun.
Pixel based operations will be a huge advancement much like it was in earlier flash versions as it adds some demo scene type abilities and experiments with pixels that are fun. This also lends to doing cool things like shaders, effects, AR, face recognition, motion detection etc.
Effects like Blur and Drop shadow are good and the ability to add custom ones, great. However currently they are pretty performance intensive. They are also in Flash but there needs to be some refinement in SL3 effects before launch.
Desktop runnable apps in out of browser will be nice and this is a direct compete with Adobe AIR which was a surprise.
Local Communication supports desktop to browser communication.
Isolated storage (similar to shared objects) supports 1MB in browser, 25MB out of browser defaults.
This version of silverlight is really a 1.0 version as typical with most software. Version 2 or version 3 is usually what the initial design goals pan out. Much like the latest unity3d version (2.5) that has windows support and the iPhone SDK 3.0 that both came out this week, even actionscript 3 compared to earlier versions, these toolkits are finally iterated enough that they are really solid platforms for building cool stuff on and become platforms. The next version of all these could be very, very dangerous.
Huge missing features:
Although there are some great features in SL3 beta, it is still not done and it is still missing some key components that Flash has which make it very attractive in the interactive space.
Camera and Microphone support - Macromedia hired one of the smartest dudes around in Jeremy Allaire back in flash 6 days to help add support for Flash Communication Server (Flash Media Server now) Camer and Microphone support. One of the best R&D periods at Macromedia. SL needs this soon.
Printing support – what was long a problem in Flash is so in SL, there is no good printing support
No GPU usage for Pixel Effects/Shaders – (neither flash nor silverlight support hardware accelerated shaders in PixelEffects/Pixelbender – Pixel Effects/Shaders need GPU support (see Kevin Goldsmith’s article on GPU mixed with CPU and how this may or may not be good. However processors are speeding up and multi-core helps software rendering, the quality of GPU is well beyond what software rendering can deliver for a few years to come at least while architecture advances, probably more like 5-10 years.
No UDP plans yet - Adobe has RTMFP, SL sockets has no public plans for adding UDP that I have seen
No Alpha Channel in Video - You can do this with a shader though but not supported by default.
Silverlight 3 Video
Flash has the upperhand in video and probably will still even though SL3 has H.264. Flash added this at the same time and though they still have FLV which revolutionized web video they are now much broader in support in video than SL3. Silverlight has H.264 and VC1 support (their own FLV like codec). Still pretty cool a couple years ago there was no HD on the web now everyone has it in H.264 video support.
Currently nothing innovative, mainly catchup still, but here are some options
Silverlight 3 beta and the video below the features and highlights will look very similar to flash and flash community advancements over the last couple years. There is no innovation just yet.
But where that could happen is in socket support with UDP. Flash has moved on this in RTMFP and the beginning of larger scale networking support with UDP with samples like stratus. This is a huge differentiating feature for what I think will be game changer on the web (it already is on desktop mmos) in real-time or closer to real-time support for larger sets of users in online games like MMOs or virtual communities, even tools to make request based real-time sites like micro-blogging faster and able to handle more users (right now it is very linear if users get many followers, UDP will allow a better distributed framework for messaging).
Local Storage
Silverlight and Unity3D all need this, Flash could use better support for this. Local saving of a files for cache beyond the internet cache and greater than the 1MB/25MB limits of SL3 IsolatedStorage. This is an issue when you are making large scale games in that you need to save lots of assets to a client but to make it economical you want ot save more than the default internet cache amount. Flash Shared Object (Local) allow you to do this somewhat but it would be great to have a way to just download files for cache (upon user agreement) to store assets in bulk of allowable types (images, video, models, bundles) to the file system.
Hardware rendering for 3d support and UDP support will put Flash and SL3 on par with the killer Unity3D kit for making online web games and other activex/plugins like instantaction that allow you to do these things already.
The one thing SL has over Flash
Flash and Flex are great. But there is this massive division in the community and marketing of Flash. Silverlight is entirely unified and this has much to do with starting clean at a time that interactive development is heading more into a technology and developers control. Flash and Flex need to bring it together. AS3 has been out long enough that the people with skills have hopped on and taken it to a new level, mainly from programmers. If Adobe created a version of Flash that was a new IDE and consolidated Flex and Flash into just Flash, made the IDE as powerful as FDT or FlashDevelop3 there could be hope to bring the platform together. I understand they had to work it in slowly because it was a designers platform really (even though coders still pushed the limits in games and apps built on it) so they had to tip toe carefully on this to not alienate people. But now I think the division is a serious problem with the platform and must be addressed, noone expected Silverlight to be this quick on at least SL3 features. And even though the initial approach might have been bad as SL1 was a huge letdown, Microsoft does not give up and you can see in the XBOX360 and DirectX that they are very pursuant. DirectX really didn’t become huge until version 7 so these guys won’t relent.
I am not a huge fan of using the proprietary tools. Even in Flash I use as much open source as I can even though the player is locked, but Moonlight is something that trails Silverlight development and is a very unique thing in both open source and cross platform/multiplatform development. It is a clear relationship and aims to make Silverlight run on multiplatform mono including Linux. This could win out in the end who knows.
I have been really busy this week just delving into all them and hope to start making more cool and useful projects in them. The best part is right now is great to be an interactive or game developer as all major software companies and markets are focused on retaining good developers. I don’t’ recall a time other than the beginning the the web virtual land rush that has so many options and markets that skilled developers and designers can choose from. Good times.
I am working with lots of content now that is flash and unity3d in game development for the web, and occasionally systems built in flash, javascript or other have to communicate with Unity3D and vice versa. You can do this from the server side (WWW/WWWForm class or sockets) OR you can also communicate client side for many things such as sending name value pairs or variables into Unity3D, Flash or the javascript in page as needed. There are some great tools like UnityObject that is like swfobject (only you have to update it to work with latest browsers) that make this more simple to send in params and messages. The same can be applied to Silverlight. It is pretty simple all in all but having a sample to start with is good with all these technologies.
Paul Tondeur threw togetother a little sample that shows how you can integrate Unity3D, Flash and javascript in the page fairly simply with lots of great demos. It really is just about passing parameters around into the objects from javascript, then within Flash calling ExternalInterface to call external javascript or within Unity3D calling Application.ExternalCall.
//Flash adding callback for javascript code
ExternalInterface.addCallback("functionNameInBrowser", functionNameInFlash );
So many cool and useful technologies are unveiled at SIGGRAPH every year, this year at SIGGRAPH 2009 was no different. Khronos Group, behind the new guidance of OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenCL, OpenVG, COLLADA etc, came another big announcement about hardware rendering within the browser. 
Khronos Details WebGL Initiative to Bring Hardware-Accelerated 3D Graphics to the Internet
