O3D update: New capabilities and expanded compatibility

We're happy to announce that today we shipped a substantial update to O3D, an API for creating rich 3D applications in a web browser. With today's release, we focused on addressing a theme we heard in the requests and feedback from the community: that O3D should run as well as possible on many different types of hardware. Toward that end, we're releasing two new additions: software rendering and feature requirements. If you've already installed the O3D plugin, you should receive these additions automatically.

Software rendering allows O3D to use the main processor to render 3D images if the machine running the app doesn't have supported graphics hardware. While the hardware O3D requires to run in hardware-accelerated mode is fairly modest by today's standards (a DirectX 9, Pixel Shader 2.0 capable graphics card), there are nonetheless PCs that don't meet these requirements, and we think it's important for web apps to run on all machines, regardless of hardware.

Because software rendering is significantly slower than hardware-accelerated rendering, we're also introducing a concept called "feature requirements" that will help minimize how often O3D will have to fall back to software rendering. Feature requirements allow developers to state upfront that their app will require certain hardware capabilities to render properly. If the machine running the app supports those features, O3D will run it fully hardware accelerated; if however, it is lacking any of the required capabilities, O3D will drop into a software rendered mode. Anecdotally, we found that this tiering allows 45 of our 48 samples to now run in hardware-accelerated mode with less capable graphics cards.

Finally, while it has nothing to do with extending hardware support, we're also adding a couple other goodies: a full-screen mode to make O3D apps more absorbing and a community gallery to feature cool demos that use O3D (like Infinite Journey, the first game developed outside Google using O3D). If you've developed an application or sample that would be useful to the O3D community, please be sure to submit it for our team to review for inclusion in the gallery using this form.

By Henry Bridge, Product Manager