Abhijeet Maharana

Opera 9.50 Alpha [Windows download ~ 5 MB] has added support for the 3D canvas. Tim Johansson, responsible for the Canvas and image decoding support in Opera has a blog entry on this. Firefox 3 Beta 1 [Download page] has an extension for this purpose and Vladimir’s blog entry on the same is located here.

I did a quick search for “javascript 3d graphics” to see if any libraries have sprung up for the calculations and other 3D chores. But I found some other neat stuff instead. ‘Neat’ not in the sense that they render some heavy-duty graphics in your browser but they use simple tricks to draw 3D objects. However, the authors may not agree with the “simple” part.

1. JS3D:
   Renders 3D objects using plain text. The text is placed in DIV tags whose coordinates are calculated by 3D matrix operations. The objects can also be interactive. You have to see the demos to experience it. Specially the Double Helix demo.

2. Triangles in Javascript:
   This one uses Javascript/DOM/CSS to render 3D triangles complete with lighting. And it achieves this by using plain old borders applied to DIV tags!

While they may not be suitable for writing games or other heavy graphics, but these nifty little tricks do impress a lot.