Monday, June 20, 2011

WebGL globes round up - in the face of security

WebGL bring the the OpenGL Embedded Systems (ES) profile to the virtual machine that the web browser is rapidly becoming. Microsoft has hit the headlines in the last few days with their proclamations about the security holes created by WebGL and their reluctance to fix them. They might be trying to plug any holes in their answer to high performance graphics in the browser - Silverlight, may be they can reuse the silverlight code to plug the GPU access security holes.

I wasn't going to rant about IE's double-standards but summarise a few WebGL globes I have come across, so here goes:
  1. A very early port of NASA WorldWind API to WebGL - Lanyard.
  2. The Swiss OpenWebGlobe.
  3. Google's data visualisation globe.
  4. WebGL Earth from Klokan.
  5. Godzi globe from Pelican.
Let us just hope that Microsoft pulls its head out of the sand and works on securing GPU access via no-matter which technology. Meanwhile I will rush off to build a video buffer capture with handhacked versions of JOGL (if anyone ever accepts my signature). What Javascript really needs is establishment of trust and signed execution.

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