Learning WebGL

I’ve just improved the WebGL tutorials:

As promised, they now use requestAnimationFrame — or, more precisely, the requestAnimFrame cross-browser compatibility function provided by this Google utility module — to schedule their repaints. This means that they won’t hog CPU/GPU time when the pages are on hidden tabs, which should help avoid getting WebGL an underserved [...]

From Nicolas Garcia Belmonte, a new WebGL framework, PhiloGL, “for Data Visualization, Creative Coding and Game Development”. The demos look amazing, with some particularly good real-world examples of what it might be used for; this page showing world temperature anomalies is particularly attractive and useful. I also like Nicolas’ choice of tutorials to [...]

Most WebGL demos out there (including my WebGL tutorials), use the JavaScript setInterval function to schedule a function to draw the 3D scene so that it is called on a regular basis. This works well enough for simple demos, but has problems if generally used. If a page is loaded in your browser, [...]

Two new cool three.js demos from OutsideOfSociety, both music-based: particles reacting to music, and a spectrum bar graph.
Three nice three.js demos showing off vertex colours: polyhedra, Hilbert curves, and particles (h/t AlteredQualia).
This page by Stephen Panosian visually explains the parameters that describe an orbit. (It would have made life much easier at work [...]

This is an excellent idea: Jarrad Hope has set up a WebGL competition in the style of the demoscene — entries must have a maximum file size of 64k. The competition is self-funded at the moment, but donations towards the prize fund are being accepted: are there any large companies out there with an [...]

Here’s another question for everyone. On the “Getting started with WebGL” page on this blog, there’s a section giving some example pages for people to look at when they’ve got everything up and running. Some time ago, I had to remove most of the examples from the list because a WebGL spec change [...]

Last week I asked:
Would jQuery make the tutorials better? Or harder to understand? Should I just stick with pure JavaScript? Or is there a library that’s so much better than jQuery that I’d be crazy not to use it? Have I just inadvertently asked a question that’s going to set off a religious war between [...]

Great news — Google have just released Chrome 9, with WebGL on by default! This is huge news, as Chrome auto-updates and so every Chrome user on the planet will now get WebGL over the next weeks. It’s finally arrived.

Loads of stuff today!

[UPDATE] Dammit, Google! Just an hour or so after I hit the “publish” button on this post, they went and released Chrome 9, with WebGL on by default! This is huge news, as Chrome auto-updates and so every Chrome user on the planet will now get WebGL over the next [...]

When I started my set of WebGL tutorials, my JavaScript experience was limited; the largest-scale work I’d done in the language was a couple of demos (the second’s by far the best, let it run for ten seconds) that I did back in 1999, when we called them “DHTML pages“. So, while I have [...]