Wild Tangent: DirectX for the Web

In June, I spent a fair amount of time look­ing at Web Dri­ver, a new tool from a com­pany cre­ated by for­mer Microsoft employ­ees. The group, which calls itself Wild Tan­gent and is led by Alex St. John, the man who cre­ated the now defunct MS-Chromeffect, is set to move ani­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy to the web.

Web­driver lets Web devel­op­ers access DirectX APIs through a com­bi­na­tion of XML tags and JavaScript, giv­ing devel­op­ers a change to cre­ate online game and graphic-rich envi­ron­ment on the web. While it only runs on Win­dows plat­forms right now, this is a sig­nif­i­cant devel­op­ment because it allows any web devel­op­ers to cre­ate soft­ware offer­ings that are now as graph­i­cally rich as any games you can find. Over­all, this is great for games but I doubt it will catch fire unless they develop a ver­sion of it for other platforms.

How­ever, if the Web­Driver com­po­nents become pack­aged with the most pop­u­lar browsers, they could her­ald the arrival of the much talked about 3D envi­ron­ments we’ve read about in Gibson’s and Stephenson’s books. If you are run­ning a win­dows machine, I’d rec­om­mend you down­load those dri­vers and try out their demos. They, not I, best show­case what this tech­nol­ogy can do.
iver­ing a richer web expe­ri­ence if they get browser sup­port. Until then, though, it will remain as excit­ing as VRML: great look­ing but still hang­ing out at the start­ing gate.