WebGL on the Nokia N900 makes us hopeful 17

The video above comes to us courtesy of Vlad, and essentially demonstrates WebGL on the Nokia N900. Vlad's blog post says the video was done at ARM techcon3, which would have been back at the end of October. Reportedly, there has been no special optimization for the N900 and even still the results are quite impressive.

Why does this matter to us and why is Nokia on PreCentral? Well, the N900 is frequently compared to the Pre, and rightfully so.  Both are based on Linux and both use the same OMAP3 3430 processor.  This shows the same kind of quality and 3D WebGL capabilities we could expect, were it to come to the Pre.

The Nokia N900 (and many other devices) use OpenGL ES 2.0 to power their 3D graphics.  It's certainly possible (if not probable) that this is the route Palm will go.  Coincidentally, OpenGL ES 2.0 is the version that WebGL is targeted to support.  Given that Palm's webOS is WebKit-based, it would stand to reason that they'll eventually adopt WebGL. This is, of course, speculation on our part.

WebGL has come a long way is a very short amount of time. As we've previously written about, WebGL only was publicly announced back in March. Since then, it's gotten industry backing by most of the big companies, been integrated in nightly builds of Firefox, WebKit, and Google Chrome.

According to Mozilla's Dec. 1st meeting minutes, "The WebGL standard goes to Khronos review this week. More public information will be forthcoming once the Khronos board approves it.".  Once the standard is set in place, hopefully more companies, like Palm, will come to adopt it. WebGL certainly would fit the webOS philosophy.