Khronos Blog Archives

Esri is a member of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®), and has been delivering geospatial solutions for over 5 decades, investing significant brain power to solve one vexing problem in the geospatial world: making massive geospatial content available across platforms and devices, including web browsers, mobile devices, and desktop applications. In response to that challenge, the Indexed 3D Scene Layer (I3S) specification was created about a decade ago. Esri worked with the community to release the specification under an Apache license in 2015. The OGC adopted I3S in 2017 as its first 3D streaming Community Standard.

One of the great headaches of developing interactive graphics applications for online deployment is covering every base. Your targets likely include a near-infinite combination of browser vendors, browser versions, and graphics hardware. The Khronos Group created WebGL to slice through this Gordian knot, rendering high-performance interactive graphics in any compatible browser, and on any graphics processing unit, without the need for plug-ins. Now, with support for WebGL 2.0 in Safari 15 for both macOS and iOS, we’re happy to report that “compatible browsers” includes pretty much all of them.