Always at the forefront of technological advances, the innovative minds at Google have provided a glimpse into the possibilities that HTML5 offers, showing off id Software’s volatile first-person shooter Quake II running entirely from the confines of a browser. See it in action above.

Not requiring any third-party plug-ins, the port takes advantage of several bleeding-edge technologies, including WebGL, the Canvas API, HTML 5 <audio> elements, the local storage API, and WebSockets.

As the feature-set of HTML5 is still a yet to be finalized work-in-progress, not all browsers are able to run this. Currently, only Safari and Google’s own Chrome, both WebKit-based browsers, carry the libraries required to play.

While the Quake II source code itself is freely available and GPL-based, a public demo is unavailable as model data, textures and sounds cannot be distributed without permission from copyright holders. Google says it is “pursuing legitimate avenues” to work around this issue, so stay tuned. In the meantime, those with the technical know-how can compile the source code themselves per instructions over at Google’s project site.

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