3D Graphics For Firefox, Webkit 198
angry tapir writes "A group of researchers plans to release a version of the Firefox browser that includes the built-in ability to view 3D graphics. They've integrated real-time ray tracing technology, called RT Fact, into Firefox and Webkit. Images are described using XML3D, and the browser can natively render the 3D scene." The browser will be released within a few weeks, the researchers say, and they are checking with the Mozilla Foundation about whether they can call it Firefox.
Short answer (Score:2, Informative)
No.
Tech for the future (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe this tech will be big when 3d monitors are out... just imagine the pop ups really poping out of your screen :)
Re:No thanks (Score:4, Informative)
Ahh, the day that comes...
Believe it or not, it's already landed [mozilla.org] on trunk - at least for Firefox running on Windows 7.
np: Autechre.ws Webcast (02.03.2010)
Re:Gallery? (Score:2, Informative)
Ok, it's a video, not an image ... [youtube.com]
Found, of course, with Google.
Searching directly on YouTube gives two further results. [youtube.com]
Re:Ray tracing vs. Rasterization (Score:3, Informative)
Shadows alone are extremely complicated in a rasterizer, with special cases for self shadowing, for when the camera is within a shadow or not, when something reflective is being rendered, when something refractive is being rendered, and so on and on.
Essentially nobody has EVER made general purpose rasterizer that flawlessly supports shadows in concert with all the other 'ray tracing like effects' and it is likely that nobody ever will, because the problem is more than just non-trivial. There is always another edge case. Games get away with it because they impose restrictions (explicit or implicit) which avoid most of the edge cases that the renderer can't handle.
Even highly developed engines such as Valve's Source Engine still have problems with incorrect shadowing of their own (non-arbitrary) content, and thats in scenes without reflections or refractions complicating the problem. Now factor in that a renderer such as this is supposed to render arbitrary content, and you see the main problem with rasterizers as general purpose photo-realistic renderers is that nobody can do it, in spite of decades of effort.
The reason to use a raytracer is because all the photo-realistic behaviors of light fall right out of it by definition. Adding yet another behavior of light is simple. Shadows, reflection, refraction, global illumination.. its all SIMPLE (tho certainly less efficient.) The problematic "quality" issues raytracers have are trivial in comparison, with the hardest probably being the inherent aliasing of sub-pixel features.
Re:Advantages of 3D games in the first place? (Score:1, Informative)
greater draw distance than one screen-width, which in many games is about 20 m
Huh? What does that even mean?
what scenarios do only 3D graphics allow for?
They look more realistic, and they allow you to simulate physics more realistically.
Re:Doesn't matter. 3D in the browser is stupid. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ray tracing vs. Rasterization (Score:3, Informative)
RTFact is based on a research paper from the University of Saarland. The paper describes the implementation of a generic real time ray tracing framework with source code in C++. The goal or objective is an interactive real-time ray tracer.
From the different implementations I researched (Manta from MIT, OpenRT, Arauna, RTSL, plus many more), RTFact is by far the most legitimate implementation. There are a million papers out there on interactive ray tracing, but only a few really take into consideration some of the major problems. I played around with OpenRT, but the amount of artifacts and aliasing really take away from the interactive experience. I have not played around with it recently, so maybe they now have an improved adaptive anti-aliasing solution, so my comments may be outdated.
The base code for RTFact is supposed go open source, but I have been waiting around for a long time without even a remote tidbit of information until this post. They actually even went backwards as they removed the paper from public distribution. Whenever it does go open source, it will be posted here.
http://www.rtfact.org/ [rtfact.org]
Now the generic ray tracing api/framework is RTFact, but from the sounds of the article posted above, they are actually integrating the scene graph RTSG into WebKit, which has also been developed by the university of Saarland. This is only speculation and I could be completely wrong.
If you want some info on RTFact, check out:
http://tiny.cc/gHMrW [tiny.cc]
For info on RTSG, check out:
http://tiny.cc/3ezO8 [tiny.cc]
If you want the original paper, the only link I could find from Google seems to be broken, but it may be due to the servers being overloaded by downloads after the announcement. I have the paper somewhere here on one of my drives, but it would take me a while to find, so if you want me to spend the time looking for it, you would need to give me some incentive by proving to me that you are in fact doing research.
In regards to your question, without a doubt, rasterization will eventually be replaced by ray tracing. Just look at Pixars evolution into photorealism. When the frame rates improve with better hardware for the general public, the framework will begin to be used in game engines, and not just scene graphs. The reasoning is aesthetic as much as it is technical. Ray tracing is truer to the physics of light than rasterization, so even though you can "fake" effects, the graphics will always be more appealing being rendered backwards than forwards. I do numerical simulation (with a background in CS from UW, where my heavy graphics knowledge comes from, plus a few years in real-time simulaton), and the true physics of the problem always gives a better solution than assumptions, approximations, correlations, and correction factors. It is a comment that my prof continually reiterates. For example, caustics will never look as good rastered as they do ray traced, since the ray tracer will map the full motion of the photons.
I could go on for hours, but I will leave it at this....