3D HTML5 video comes to YouTube

Mozilla, YouTube and NVIDIA have announced that videos containing 3D data will be transcoded into the open WebM format and played in high-quality stereoscopic 3D.

The feature is only available in Firefox 4, and NVIDIA hardware is also required.

Mozilla’s director of product platform management Chris Blizzard blogged:
“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 built on open web technologies.”

There are already thousands of 3D videos on YouTube, thanks to the recent proliferation of affordable 3D video cameras. If you have the hardware, head to www.youtube.com/select_3d_mode to set things up, then search for 3D YouTube videos by looking for the tag “yt3d”.

And if you want to see what Hollywood's up to in 2012, check out the best 3D movies at our sister site Creative Bloq.