WebGL is an effort to bring native, high-performance 3D graphics to web browsers by offering a JavaScript API to OpenGL ES, which draws onto the <canvas> element. Very cool.

Jeff Rosen happened to notice support for WebGL in the latest Webkit codebase and whipped up some demos.

Google, FireFox and Opera are also part of the WebGL Working Group and have plans to implement similar 3D graphics capabilities. Not sure what Microsoft’s plans to offer with Internet Explorer–we’ll probably get stuck with WebDirectX or something :(

Who knows how long it will be until there is widespread support for native 3D graphics in web browsers. But seeing this kind of cooperation and progress makes me pretty optimistic.

(via ajaxian)