Learning WebGL

A somewhat shorter list this week:

• WebGL Jobs is getting off to a good start, with three jobs listed since Tuesday.
• Collin Hover’s work-in-progress game, Kai ‘Opua (“clouds over the ocean” in Hawaiian), is fun, engaging, and will be free/open forever.
• I’ve always wanted to see something like this: a simple visualisation of the world’s geography as it was over the last 600 million years. (via theo on the Three.js subreddit)
• Nicolas Jarraud’s Mecabricks lets you build Lego-like models using bricks from a library. Fun!
• Over at LearningThreeJS, two new posts from Jerome Etienne: Sound Visualisation: A Vuemeter in WebGL, and a tQuery Plugin for Doom Characters.
• Carve your own caves, thanks to Jasmine Kent Langridge. (via WebGL.com)
• Create your own paper toy online, courtesy of Grouek. [UPDATE: Benoit Jacob points out in the comments that this is Chrome-only]
• An interesting post on the state of the port of Sauerbraten to WebGL (from C++/OpenGL) by Alon Zakai — no new demos, but worth reading if you’re interested in what you can do with Emscripten.
• Interested in Google’s new Dart language (their planned JavaScript replacement)? Interested in WebGL (I guess so if you’re reading this)? Then check out this simple WebGL/Dart demo.
• This one managed to take out my graphics card, but it was worth it: another how-do-you-do-that-in-a-shader demo on the GLSL sandbox, this one from Phil Schumann.
• On the subject of shader demos, I think I linked to Cody Brocious’ Magister before, but Fl0wer is also nice, as are many of the other demos here (check out the .png.html files) and here. Check out the file sizes on that first link for a bit of a shock…
• …and you should also check out Paulo Falcão’s Blobs Modification. (via WebGL.com)
• Interesting: Arius3d sell 3D images, using WebGL to preview. (via Andor Salga)
• This is an inventive use of the Sketchfab online model viewer: take a look at the Mes-Aynak archaeological site in Afghanistan.
• Still confused by WebGL blending modes? Some help from Mr.doob.
• Also educational: why we get seasons, by Stephen Bannasch. (via WebGL.com)
• Simple, but impressive: lots of Three.js particles.
• More fun with Three.js particles: exploding geometry tessellations. (via WebGL.com)
• Of course, if you can see him then he can’t really be a ninja.

Got a WebGL demo you want me to put in next week’s roundup? Leave a comment below, or drop me a line!

Wow, now this has been a busy week!

• Cube is an advert/game based on Google Maps, by Jaume Sánchez Elias, Jordi Ros, and B-Reel. Very addictive! (via Alvaro, thanks to AlteredQualia and Mr.doob for the attribution)
• More Google Maps — a new extension giving photo tours of famous landmarks using WebGL. (via Mr.doob)
• And finally, the older 3D building views in Google Maps have also been enhanced recently.
• Microsoft’s refusal to support WebGL in its browser is an ongoing pain, so many thanks to Mr.doob for giving a simple demo of Internet Explorer with WebGL.
• Via Patrick Cozzi, three class projects from his students at the University of Pennsylvania; all have useful blogs, in particular for the most recent posts, which are have interesting videos and the final presentations:
  • Alice Yang’s Procedurally Generating an Infinite City: here’s the project blog, and final demo.
  • Nop Jiarathanakul’s Ray Marching of Distance Fields in Real Time in WebGL — project blog, and the final demo.
  • Adair Liu’s Volumetric Lighting: project blog, final demo (works best in Firefox, apparently — though it worked fine in Chrome for me).
• On the subject of wonderful shaders on the GLSL Sandbox (which we almost were), this one is lovely too. (via Kevin Roast)
• Chandler Prall’s Physijs is a Three.js physics plugin built on top of ammo.js. I highly recommend the Jenga demo!
• I mentioned the Ludum Dare game competition last week — here are some of the current round’s WebGL/HTML5 entries, collected by David Evans. WebGL-specific entries are My Little Dungeon, Laser Coin Planets, Tiny World Of Lifeand the previously-mentioned LittlePlanetBigRocket. I think SlimeABug is also WebGL. What’s particularly cool is that all of them were built in at most a weekend!
• More on the gaming front: WebGL.com have found two different WebGL Pong games: Player vs Computer by Richard Tuin, and Player vs Player by Rob Ashton (with help from Yves Reynhout and Tom Janssens), while Jerome Etienne has managed to create (with WebRTC) an augmented-reality 3D pong in just 100 lines of JavaScript!
• Or more adventurously, you can teach Tux the penguin to fly his wingsuit over at Spacegoo.
• I mentioned CAAT, a JavaScript animation toolkit with a WebGL-based renderer, back in December. Here’s a scarily addictive little game written as a technology demonstrator: Sumon.
• This is great fun: ‘Livecodelab is a special secret place where you can make fancy “on-the-fly” 3d visuals and play awesomely offbeat (literally) sounds.’ As Mr.doob says, it’s like the old Logo language, but in 3D!
• I’m surprised I didn’t see this before: a nice plasma demo by Bartek Drozdz, written as a demo for J3D. (via WebGL.com)
• Publish Your Design allows product designers to upload 3D designs of their products so that purchasers can get a good idea of what they’re buying. A particularly neat feature for designers is that the design is not transmitted as an easily-copyable model file, but instead as NURBS — meaning that the product can be faithfully rendered without too much chance of design piracy.
• “ThreeFab is a [alpha] tool that allows designers and developers to quickly fabricate and manipulate a three.js scene.” Live demo here.
• R is a language beloved by statisticians, and RGL is a visualisation toolkit for it — which now supports an option to export a (big) web page embedding a data visualisation using WebGL.
• Node.js isn’t just for web servers any more — it’s also a platform to build desktop apps using JavaScript. So it’s great that Mikael Bourges-Sevenier has written node-webgl, node-webcl and node-glfw. Read more at DailyJS.
• Here are some of the 1997-vintage Grand Theft Auto levels converted to Three.js by Niklas von Hertzen. (via Hacker News)
• I’m surprised we’re not seeing more of these: Artfolio is a virtual art gallery where artists can display their creations online. I particularly like that you can walk out of the gallery and see it from outside :-) (via Chrome Experiments). And Image Armada is similar, allowing individuals to create their own galleries (via WebGL.com).
• Here’s a fantastic post on the state of WebGL support across the net (broken down by various features and extensions), by Florian Boesch. Essential reading if you’re doing serious WebGL development.
• Theo Armour’s tutorial on how to make animated human-like characters using a small set of free tools is now complete: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5.
• And another lovely water simulation, this one from Edouard Coulon (via Chrome Experiments).
• Slightly headache-inducing, but cool: Drawing 3D SuperShapes with Three.js, by Alejandro Mosquera. (via theo on the WebGL subreddit)
• Using compressed textures in your WebGL app is useful — they take less time to send from the machine’s main memory up to the graphics card, and less space in the graphics card’s memory. The problem is that it’s a pain to convert the images you already have to a GPU-friendly compressed format (GPUs don’t like JPEG, PNG or GIF) and that those formats aren’t as efficient as normal image formats anyway — they’ve been designed to be easy for the GPU to decompress, not for general efficiency. Evan Parker’s solution? Send images from web server to browser in a normal compressed format, then convert them on the fly to a GPU-friendly format using JavaScript! (via mariuz on the WebGL subreddit)
• On the subject of textures, Brandon Jones’ WebGL texture-loading library is now genuinely useful, and uses Evan’s work to support CRN files.
• Some musings on Three.js extruded splines and knots from Zz85.
• Some fun OpenGL samples converted to WebGL by Taskinoor Hasan
• Cafe4tune is a social network with a 3D environment, written in WebGL with a fallback to Flash. (via intomobile)
• A neat shader effect, making an image look like an old film.
• A quick post on rendering Blender models using Three.js by Dealga McArdle (via theo on the WebGL subreddit).
• Sol Mi Re do various online tricks with MIDI files, and this demo shows that they can render music files visually. At least for me, it didn’t play any sounds, but interesting nonetheless. (via theo on the WebGL subreddit)
• If you play EVE Online, you might find this visualisation of the in-game markets useful for your trading. (via theo on the WebGL subreddit)
• Fame indeed: Andor Salga’s face, featured on WebGL.com
• Mathieu Triay’s M’Otter is a quasi-game allowing you to move around the streets of Bloomsbury in London. WebGL.com has the details.
• A new WebGL book, on sale now: Professional WebGL Programming: Developing 3D Graphics for the Web by Andreas Anyuru. (via theo on the WebGL subreddit)
• If you’re using a browser that supports WebRTC (basically a dev version of Chrome or an alpha Firefox), the new standard for real-time communications from browsers, then if you haven’t checked out Jerome Etienne’s post on WebGL Meeting, a real-time videoconferencing tool built with, well, you know what, then do so right now.
• WebGL advertising for a non-WebGL game: The Amazing Spiderman.

Got a WebGL demo you want me to put in next week’s roundup? Leave a comment below, or drop me a line!

• The first WebGL Camp Europe has been announced! It’s on 3 July 2012 in Muttenz (near Basel), Switzerland.
• The mass driver test organised by Benoit Jacob of Mozilla has led to a bunch of fixes going in to Gecko, so if you’re interested in helping again, the second round of tests has now started.
• Sway is a very neat 4K demo by Bits’n’Bites. (via WebGL.com) [WARNING: Steve reports in the comments that this one "crashes my graphics driver. Using Chrome versions 19 and 20, Windows 7 32-bit, NVidia Geforce 8600m"]
• Here’s a cool shader-only demo by Simon Green on the GLSL Sandbox, inspired by M.C. Escher’s Depth. (via AlteredQualia)
• Ludum Dare is a rapid game development community; LittlePlanetBigRocket is a very fun entry into their “Tiny Planets” WebGL competition, from David Evans.
• Another great demo from AlteredQualia: a car with gorgeous baked illumination. (via WebGL.com)
• Never mind all this GPU-enabled realism stuff. Let’s render our Three.js scenes in ASCII! (via Tony Parisi)
• Stewart Hamilton-Arrandale’s Ribbons demo is quite attractive. (via WebGL.com)
• The Superformula can apparently be used to describe many complex shapes and curves that are found in nature. Here’s a Three.js-based explorer for it, by (I think) Sebastian Sadowski.
• Jerome Etienne’s Tunnel demo will look familiar to anyone who’s seen the BlackBerry TunnelTilt game — though it doesn’t have the gameplay elements yet. (via WebGL.com)
• Here’s a nice little fractal terrain generator in Three.js by Xueqiao Xu (via Nooshu on the Three.js subreddit)
• Kamiori is a site by Aleece Burgess to teach origami using WebGL. (via WebGL.com)
• Following the Japanese theme, if vocaloid music is your kind of thing then you might like Atsushi Takayama’s Miku Miku Dance. (via WebGL.com)
• Windows Maze by SirTopHat is quite fun! (via WebGL.com)
• Gerber files are used to describe printed circuit boards; Mayhew Labs have developed an online viewer for their results. (via Nooshu on the Three.js subreddit)

• The push towards removing WebGL’s “experimental” status is underway. The WebGL Working Group are asking for volunteers to try out the WebGL 1.0.1 conformance tests in development versions of their favorite browsers, using recent graphics drivers, to see the actual status of passing conformance tests on real drivers. Here’s how to help. (h/t Benoit Jacob)
• Not strictly WebGL, but many of you might be interested to know that the draft for the WebCL specification (defining a language to do non-graphical calculations on the GPUs of browsers visiting your site) is now public. GPU physics in online games?
• Very seasonal: Sakura (cherry blossoms)
• Another cool demo at playpit.kowareru.com — Metaballism.
• Another great WebGL tutorial from Gregg Tavares: 2D Translations
• A nice water simulation, with Fresnel reflection/refraction, geometric ray tracing, and HDRI, from Zhang Bei.
• Retro fun: Alex May has ported his Amiga Space-Invader-like game from 1991 to WebGL. Click Ctrl to start.
• Two fun posts from Theo Armour: creating extruded Three.js text using Blender and How to Make Animated Peeps.
• Apparently compo / filler by vrtx was made in just one night. Impressive.
• Pulpo is also an attractive Three.js demo, though I can’t find out who created it.
• Lots of nice demos at the WebGL Playground gallery.
• From Sebastian Poręba, a tutorial on creating a 3D Tetris game using Three.js.
• Darien Acosta’s put together a Three.js-based Half Life zombie, plus a tutorial so that other people can also port Half-Life models to WebGL.
• I can see this becoming useful: Brandon Jones has started a project to make loading compressed texture formats easier. It only supports DDS for now.
• Sadly, it’s Chrome-only, but Speed of Light looks fun.
• Over at Ultranoir, an interesting article on WebGL and E-commerce by Mathilde Vandier.
• If you’re in Oslo on May 26th, the Standards Next conference (after the Web Rebels conf) on WebGL and HTML5-based games at Opera’s office looks interesting — some great talks. (via Jerome Etienne)
• Want to see some quality WebGL win a Webby? ROME has been nominated, vote for it here and here. (via @jonobr1)
• “Neo4j is a high-performance, NOSQL graph database with all the features of a mature and robust database”. Here’s how to hook it up to Three.js, using Ruby on the server side.
• An interesting idea for speeding up WebGL matrix operations from Stefan Hedman: move them up to the vertex shader.
• Another nice demo from Geoscope [UPDATE: it's now called Cesium]: a simulation of North Korea’s rocket launch on 12 April. More info in their blog post about it.
• As always, there’s some nice stuff over at WebGL.com:
  • A very attractive Fresnel glass Buddha by Philip Rideout
  • Halo, a Google WebGL sample by Kenneth Waters, is gorgeous.
  • Fissure is another impressive game from Chris Gauthier.
  • Track is a racing game.
  • AirScape is a “gravity based action hardcore platforming game”
  • …and Dungeonspace is a, well, dungeon game, by Crank Gaming
  • Marbles is a physics demo from Joshua Perez
  • Nutty Software have created a simple tornado demo (it gave me a few warning alerts as it loaded, but worked nonetheless).

• A useful resource for any developer, from Florian Bösch: WebGL Stats. Just over 50% of the sample have WebGL enabled, which is promising if not as high as we might all hope!
• Great news from Mozilla Labs: Gladius is a new engine for web-based games, using Charles Cliffe’s CubicVR.js for graphics and box2d.js for 2D physics. Particularly good news, if you liked the No Comply demo, is that Andor Salga is working with them to build a Gladius game using it. Here’s the announcement, here’s the Github repo. (h/t Tony Parisi)
• I mentioned Geoscope the other week — this is a particularly cool demo, showing satellite orbits: click on a satellite for information.
• This looks pretty promising: on Kickstarter, check out John David Martin’s Mine Mars: A Voxel Based JavaScript + WebGL Adventure.
• Demoscene coolness from Alcatraz and Scoopex: Radiotherapy; click the “online version” link to the right to see it. (via Jochen_0x90h)
• Sunset on the sea is a gorgeous fragment-shader-only Ray Marching (Sphere Tracing) & Ray Tracing demo by Riccardo Gerosa. Actually, the whole GLSL Sandbox site is well worth a look, there’s some cool stuff there now. (via Ed Mackey)
• There are a bunch of cool three.js demos at playpit.kowareru.com — in particular, this neat physics demo using cannon.js.
• On the subject of physics demos, use the mouse to point your viewpoint in an interesting direction and then try hitting the space bar in this Quake-based demo from Brandon Jones.
• Homage to a 1990-vintage VGA test, by Soledad Penadés.
• If you have access to some kind of head-tracking hardware (a Kinect, perhaps?) this this blog post by Ben Hopkins might give you some interesting ideas on how to make a 3D scene more 3D.
• I think most of these have been mentioned here before, but it’s worth a look anyway: a roundup of scientific WebGL visualisation, from CreativeJS.
• On a related note — scientific data sets are rarely in the form of meshes of triangles, so rendering them poses particular challenges. Volume Ray Casting in WebGL by John Congote, Luis Kabongo, Aitor Moreno, Alvaro Segura, Andoni Beristain, Jorge Posada and Oscar Ruiz (you know it’s a real scientific paper when it has seven authors) explains one technique.
• More competition for my tutorials: WebGL for Dummies.
• Over at WebGL.com this week, we have:
  • Charles Cliffe’s Stunt Track demo for CubicVR is definitely fun.
  • First the adventurer pillages the dungeon, then you come along and have to tidy up after him. *Sigh*. Life’s not easy in Chris Gauthier’s Easy Does It.
  • If you like Daft Punk, you’ll love Don Hahn’s Daftunes.
  • Derek Leung’s Blocks is a great game!
  • Bumble is a fun decode-the-anagram game.
  • I’m sure I’ve seen Electric Flower before, but it looks like I never posted it. This version, working as a demo of Ben Vanik’s WebGL Inspector, is beautiful.
  • This page for architects illuminates an architectural scene appropriately for any given time of day.
  • Here’s a demo showing how a pump is put together.
  • Karl Westin’s Photoshop Blend Modes demonstrates a couple of, well, Photoshop’s blend modes.
  • “Sensilia simply takes your image files and maps them on 3D models.” The first step: right now, it offers a way to create a 3D business card.

• I’m sure everyone’s already seen this one, but it’s very cool indeed: Google search now does 3D graphing! WebGL.com has a list of cool functions to try out. (h/t Mr.doob)
• A great tutorial in .NET magazine from Paul Lewis — “Create an interactive liquid metal ball with WebGL“. If your taste in interactive liquid metal things tends more to monkies, Paul has that covered too.
• Paul Lewis has also written a great tutorial on using environment maps, which inspired this wonderful WebGL/Google Street View mashup from Jaume Sánchez Elias.
• While we’re looking at reflection mapping demos, here’s one from Mr. doob and one by both him and Jaume Sánchez Elias.
• Confused by WebGL’s plethora of blending options? Here’s some help from AlteredQualia.
• Chris Dzombak has put together some “[i]nitial really ugly and hacky visual realtime diffs of audio files with WebAudio and WebGL”. There are two demos, song vs clicktrack and song vs song+clicktrack. They take a little while to load the audio and there’s no indicator (yet?), so be patient.
• Some more entries in the 3D content-sharing and creation space, joining OurBricks and SketchFab (which, by the way, now has a nice model-embedding feature):
  • “GlowScript is an easy-to-use, powerful environment for creating 3D animations and publishing them on the web.” (h/t Bruce Sherwood)
  • sunglass.io is a more fully-featured 3D design tool that also allows you to share your workspace with other people as you build your content.
  • BlendSwap, a place for Blender artists to share their work, now also has a WebGL preview of some of the models. (h/t AlteredQualia)
• WebGL Up and Running by Tony Parisi (published by O’Reilly) should be released in July. I’m currently reading a draft and it’s looking great!
• Cool: Nokia’s 3D maps now has a version you can view with red-blue 3D glasses (h/t The Verge)
• Einar Öberg’s lathe is quite a nice little Three.js demo.
• Also Three.js is Manny Tan’s disc experiment; he’s blogged about it here.
• Morten Nobel-Jørgensen created the KickJS game engine (mentioned here before); here’s his master’s thesis, which uses it as an example.
• Want to run WebGL in Firefox even though your driver’s blacklisted? It may well not work anyway, but here’s instructions on how to ignore the blacklist, from Craig Buckler. (via HTML5 Game Dev News.)
• If you’re still stuck with outdated drivers, you’ll be happy to know that Chrome 18, which uses the SwiftShader library to render WebGL in software on your CPU — more slowly than on the graphics hardware, but still impressively well — is now the official stable release. I believe SwiftShader is still only enabled on Windows, though.
• And, of course, you can always ignore the GPU blacklist on Chrome with command-line flags: --enable-webgl --ignore-gpu-blacklist
• More good stuff over at WebGL.com this week:
  • G-code is a language used to command 3D printers, and Joe Walnes has written a WebGL viewer so that you do a print preview…
  • Milkshake, a WebGL music visualiser from Matt Gattis — sadly it seems to use Flash for the audio.
  • MagicCube is a Rubik’s cube simulation developed to demo the Oak3D framework.
  • Progressive Fractal from Felix Woitzel is strangely attractive.
  • Christian Wannerstedt’s Line Dance is (luckily) not at all what I expected from the name :-) His Plane Deformation demo is also worth a look — demoscene-style shaders.
  • More demoscene stuff, this time from Frank Reitberger: Artificial.
  • Cockpit.js puts a simple Cockpit overlay onto a web page, and Jens Arp has overlaid it on top of a Three.js spaceflight demo for a nice effect.
  • A cool — well, hot — fireball from AlteredQualia.
• If you’re on the lookout for even more sources of cool new WebGL demos, over on the webgl-dev list, Theo Armour points out that there are subreddits for WebGL generally and Three.js specifically.

Got a WebGL site you’d like to see in next week’s roundup? Leave a comment below!

• The videos of the sessions from WebGL Camp Orlando are now online.
• Hoverbattles by Rob Ashton looks brilliant — and even more brilliantly, he’s blogged about the challenges of getting a multiplayer game working using NodeJS and WebGL — essential reading.
• Proof that slides from a WebGL talk don’t have to use WebGL themselves to be useful from Benoit Jacob — an excellent introduction to the principles behind the API. Relatedly: if you were there and were wondering how to get a Firefox hoodie like Benoit’s, this looks like a good place.
• OpenWorm is a project to completely simulate a very primitive kind of real-world life. They’ve built a cool WebGL viewer so you can see how it’s put together.
• WebGL and webcam demos are coming thick and fast, and you can run them in Chrome Canary with the right flags and certain versions of Opera (I had problems with Opera mobile). Here’s one from Bartek Drozdz.
• On the subject of using WebGL with new web technologies, here’s a list of technologies to use with it by Bruce Lawson.
• Another great port using Mandreel from Baktery: Cube 2: Sauerbraten.
• Cédric Pinson’s ShowWebGL 3D model-sharing site is now Sketchfab, and is fully live — you can upload models in any of a plethora of different formats. Here are a couple of architectural renderings I came across, along with the models from MIOP, a game Cedric wrote back in January.
• Einar Öberg’s procedural eye is strangely beautiful, though not entirely for the squeamish.
• “Geoscope is a web-based, plugin-free JavaScript framework that uses WebGL to visualize time-varying data relevant to the aerospace and defense industry.”
• Hero of Crystalmire is a game from indie developer Miladin Danailov, and is definitely worth a look.
• If you’re trying to convince colleagues that they should use WebGL instead of Flash, you might like to read this article. Basically, in August Adobe will start charging developers 9% of their revenues over $50,000 for content using “premium” Flash features, which include hardware-accelerated graphics. A good day for open Web technologies! (h/t Rémi Arnaud on the Public WebGL list.)
• From Brandon Liu — simple, but maybe useful if you’re cycling in San Francisco.
• More great links over at WebGL.com this week; here are the new ones that caught my eye:
  • Classic demoscene gorgeousness from Jeremy Cowles in Cubic Dub.
  • Pyroxene’s Mini Mass Effect is a homage to the video game.
  • A lovely water demo by Edouard Coulon
  • A very playable driving game: Patai Gergely’s Web Stunts.
  • Simple, but beautiful: Chaser, by Yukiya Okuda.
  • GLmol Molecular Viewer by biochem_fan is exactly what you’d expect.
• On the subject of in-browser chemistry Evgeny Demidov has been playing with the Chemdoodle WebGL components, and has managed to display some standard chemical description files.
• Not WebGL-specific, but definitely relevant: Brandon Jones writes on work he’s done minimising memory leaks and garbage collection in his own RAGE demo.
• Aexol are, among other things, a web design agency. They’ve created a WebGL library called aexolGL, and the demos are here.
• Another WebGL “platform for 3D apps” is Cloudmach. Demos here.
• WebGL doesn’t have to be all about 3D, or even impressive effects. Clibe use it subtly in their online books, just to provide a smooth page-turning animation.

Got a WebGL site you’d like to see in next week’s roundup? Leave a comment below!

• I’ve not covered Mandreel properly in the past (in fact, I think the only post has been an early demo they did last May). But it looks extremely impressive — it’s “a complete set of tools allow converting C++ and Objective-C applications based on OpenGL ES to web applications” — either using WebGL or Flash. Baktery has been porting demos using it, with impressive results — some highlights are VIP2 and Despair.
• Relatedly, badlogicgames have created a GWT backend for their LibGDX 2D and 3D game development framework — here are some ported Android games from Stefan Wagner: qb and Pax Britannica.
• Rob Chadwick’s landscape editor is cool — all of the work happens on the GPU, so as long as you have a decent graphics card it’s very fast and produces gorgeously-rendered results. There’s also a video here.
• The Tilk Firefox plugin, which uses WebGL to display 3D representations of the structure of web pages, is now part of the official built-in Firefox webdev tools!
• Another fine demo from the indefatigable OutsideOfSociety: Water/Ocean. (via WebGL.com)
• And another from Einar Öberg, Plasma Ball. (also via WebGL.com)
• AlteredQualia is another regular in these roundups, and here’s a Screen Space Ambient Occlusion demo he’s put together.
• And another fun game from Ivan Kuckir, Loud Rider.
• And Dave Nicholas’ game Mariana’s Space Adventure is in its early stages, but promising.
• Some great new links over at WebGL.com:
  • Bob Wood and Matt Milton’s Balloon Gunner is good fun. Chrome-only, though :-( (WebGL.com writeup)
  • Where Does My Tweet Go?, which does exactly what you’d expect
  • Some new driving-based demos of the CubicVR framework by its creator, Charles J. Cliffe
  • Another one whose name gives it away: Invaders From Space
  • I’m pretty sure I posted OutsideOfSociety’s Snowfall demo before, but I can’t find it, so here you go.
  • Edouward Coulon’s GPU attractors are also very, um, attractive :-)
• If you’re interested in the technical details of the Nervous System online jewellery design tool covered last week, read Jesse Louis-Rosenberg’s blog post about it.
• Armin Ronacher’s Meincraft is, of course, a WebGL-based Minecraft-style demo. (via WebGL.com, again!)
• Something interesting coming up: online chemistry books using HTML5 and WebGL, thanks to Chemdoodle and Inkling.
• A strobe tuner is an incredibly accurate mechanical device for tuning musical instruments. No prizes for guessing what web technology Hunter Davis used to code one…

Got a WebGL site you’d like to see in next week’s roundup? Leave a comment below!

• Nervous System produce custom jewellery based on cellular designs, and they’ve written a WebGL design tool (apparently based on Processing.js) for it.
• More fun from OutsideOfSociety: Monster Truck. (via Creative JS)
• The X Toolkit (as well having a name that sends shivers down the spine of many developers of a certain age) is WebGL framework to visualize medical imaging data and other scientific data.
• “The purpose of gloc is to make it much easier to build – and much easier to share – shaders”.
• As everyone knows, cows are the natural enemies of zombies. Yagiz Gurgul proves the point.
• Anisotropic filtering, which landed in Firefox nightlies a little while back, is now in the Chrome dev channel. Brandon Jones has a good post about it.
• Also from Brandon, and not strictly WebGL, but if you’re building HTML5 games using some of the new experimental APIs like full-screen display and mouse-locking, you’ll probably find his game shim useful.