Not too long ago the Opera Core developers have started to blog on the internet, opening up on some of the core technologies used by Opera today and in the future. Tim Johansson demonstrated some graphical demos this time that really do look exciting.

Of course the demos are experiments and all that is shown does not necessarily mean it will appear as part of Opera, at least not very soon.

The first demo was Tim's first assignment at Opera Software and shows the ability to use the Opera's rendering engine as a texture. Powered by Tim's own 3D engine, Opera is used as a flash light texture on the stairs, floors and walls. Besides a cool 3D engine, the most important thing is that when Opera itself is a texture, it's almost usable anywhere on anything.

The second demo was also very impressive. Hardware acceleration is something the people at Mozilla worked on by adding Cairo to Gecko. So far it's purely used for image scaling and fonts rendering. In Tim's demo we see Apple like effects being triggered by hardware acceleration (in DirectX and OpenGL), with smooth tab switching, where the page "scrolls" outside of the window. Another new effect is the nice fade in/out of the drop down menus. Of course this feature is not just for the looks, the intention is to render SVG and the <canvas> element in hardware, which take up a lot of CPU power normally. Hardware acceleration is still experimental and is not available in any released or soon to be released products, hopefully we can get a build through Opera Labs in the near future though.