Learning WebGL

Just a few for today:

Via Stephen White, a very cool demo coming out Cauê Waneck, Dennis Ippel, and Rob Bateman’s work to port some of the demos for the Flash 3D library Away3D to WebGL.
Cnet’s Stephen Shankland has spotted that Kenneth Russell has just checked changes into Chromium that will enable WebGL to run without [...]

A bunch of great stuff since my last roundup:

SceneJS version 0.7.0 has been released, supporting automatic shader generation, a more complete lighting model, layered textures, frustum culling, level-of-detail selection, logging, VRAM cache management, animated textures, and fog — picking didn’t make it, unfortunately, but it sounds like it’s coming sometime soon. If you haven’t [...]

It sounds like some machines might have problems with the render-to-texture code that I’ve written for lesson 16, which is a pain! I’d be really grateful if more people could let me know what they’re seeing when they load up the demo page; you should see a slowly-rotating laptop, on the screen of which [...]

Three for today:

“The Spaciblō project is creating a set of tools which enable web based social spaces. While the lessons from urban planning, architecture, virtual worlds and online games are relevant and considered, this project uses the social and technological patterns of the web as its starting points.” And it’s using WebGL to do [...]

I’ve completed the first cut of the WebGL code for lesson 16; its code still needs significant tidying before I write it up, but I think it looks pretty much right. If you have a WebGL browser (here’s how to get one), click the link in the last sentence, and if you don’t, here’s [...]

Just two links today:

Andor Salga has blogged about some interesting cross-browser incompatibilities he’s found with the WebGL readPixels function; worth knowing about if you’re planning to do anything using it soon.
Dennis Ippel’s Blender to WebGL exporter now supports the simplest kind of animation — frame animation, where you have vertex positions for each frame. [...]

Just one for today:

Jacob Seidelin, creator of the musical Solar System (which is working again), has come up with another great graphical demo, albeit without the techno soundtrack: Worlds of WebGL.

Alvaro Segura writes saying that it looks like they’ve switched off WebGL in the Chrome dev channel; I’ve just tried it out and found the same. A while back, Kenneth Russell recommended (on the public WebGL mailing list) that people using WebGL should use the Chromium nightly builds rather than the dev channel, and [...]

Some great stuff today:

This is an brilliant idea: ANGLE, a [UPDATE Google-sponsored] open source library that implements the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification on top of DirectX. Lots of Windows users, people with laptops in particular, have been disappointed that when they tried to get WebGL running, their graphics cards’ drivers couldn’t support it, and [...]

I gave a five-minute lighting talk about WebGL at a London Google Technology User Group meeting this evening; seemed to go down quite well! Here’s a copy of the (Open Office) slides, and here are the pages I used as demos (this is how to get a WebGL-enabled browser to view them in):

Spinning WebGL [...]