Editor’s note: Today, Mozilla, NVIDIA and YouTube announced support for 3D HTML5 video, available exclusively in Firefox. You can find the announcement here and read more details from Mozilla Director of Platform Product Management, Chris Blizzard, here. Below is an excerpt from the blog post.
Starting with Firefox 4, WebM videos encoded with 3D data will be displayed in high-quality stereoscopic 3D using NVIDIA 3D Vision hardware. 3D hardware has moved from movie theaters and into people’s homes through TVs, laptop and desktop machines. 3D video games are in wide use today. And consumer hardware that’s capable of capturing 3D photos and videos is starting to come onto the market. In fact, there are several thousand 3D videos available today on YouTube. And starting today YouTube will transcode and play these videos into the open WebM format with 3D for use with their HTML5 player. This feature is currently only available in Firefox 4. It’s our hope that other browsers will follow and add support for 3D HTML5 video as well.
This is part of our larger effort to bring open video to the Web. We’ve been glad to work with NVIDIA and YouTube on this project building the solution entirely on open standards like WebM and HTML5. Our hope is that by lowering the barrier for 3D video on the Web, we’ll see more interesting apps being build on open Web technologies.