Nvidia Corp. said Tuesday that it is making its Nvidia 3D Vision video player technology available for free to Web developers, enabling them to easily build websites for streaming stereo-3D (S3D) video to 3D Vision-equipped PCs. Even though the technology looks impressive, it remains to be seen how popular will it become.

Nvidia is the first company to deliver a stereo-3D video plug-in for the Microsoft Media Platform (MMP) player framework v2.5 (Silverlight media framework) with support for active-shutter 3D glasses. The plug-in is based on the same technology that powers Nvidia's popular 3D web community.

The MPP player framework is open-source code that enables developers to quickly deploy robust, scalable, customizable media-player applications for the web, based on Microsoft Silverlight and with full support for IIS smooth streaming and Microsoft PlayReady DRM.

"The Web is enabling an entirely new market for creating and delivering compelling, innovative 3D content. Our 3D Vision technology now makes it easy for web developers to integrate world-class stereo 3D video capabilities into all types of sites," said Jon Barad, senior business development manager at Nvidia.

While at present there are a number of video streaming services, there are no services who currently stream stereo-3D video due to the lack of S3D content available widely.

"With Nvidia's new 3D video plug-in, developers can now take full advantage of the stereoscopic 3D video streaming support available in the latest version of Microsoft Media Platform Player Framework. Microsoft is delighted to work with Nvidia to deliver exciting functionality and capabilities to help developers build the next wave of websites powered by the Microsoft Media Platform," said David Sayed, senior product manager at Microsoft Corp.

Tags: Nvidia, 3D Vision, Microsoft, Silverlight, Stereo 3D