Google is one of the Khronos member companies helping to develop the WebGL specification, bringing hardware accelerated 3D rendering to the web via the Canvas element. Today is the release of the initial public draft of the WebGL spec. We're happy to announce that Chromium contains provisional WebGL support on Linux (32- and 64-bit), Mac and Windows. This implementation was developed in close collaboration with Apple Computer and utilizes much shared code from WebKit.

See Getting a WebGL Implementation for instructions on getting a Chromium build and enabling WebGL support. This is an early version with many caveats, but with it you can get a taste of the new functionality coming to the web.

Here are a few demos to whet your appetite:

• San Angeles futuristic cityscape demo
• Shiny teapot demo illustrating compositing of 3D graphics with the web page
• Particle system demo showing how to use the GPU to animate particles

The WebGL wiki is the central location for information about the evolving specification, including the draft spec, introductory articles, tutorials, mailing lists and forums. See the WebGL demo repository for more demos and instructions on how to check out their source code.

We're looking forward to finalizing the WebGL specification and making this functionality available to web developers, and look forward to your feedback. For Chromium-specific questions, use the Chromium-dev mailing list, for more general WebGL questions, use the WebGL forums or WebGL public mailing list.