Learning WebGL

It’s been a busy week!

• Very very cool indeed: from Evgeny Demidov, Conway’s game of life on the GPU using WebGL. On his main WebGL page you can also see he’s taken the Mandelbrot demo we saw a while back even further. Impressive stuff!
• Big news for Paul Brunt’s GLGE: it now supports particle systems, which enable realistic smoke, flame, and water effects, and environment maps, which are the first step towards reflections.
• I don’t think I’ve mentioned these excellent tutorials for the C3DL WebGL library before; on the subject of particle effects, here’s the one that describes them.
• …and on the subject of C3DL, the Twitter fishtank we saw last week has moved on, with the ability to drive it using different search terms and a button to repopulate the tank.
• Via the WebGL dev list, a completely new framework: the first steps in a port of the CubicVR framework. Here are a few demos: parallax, lathe, object composition, and a Processing.js television.
• Benjamin DeLillo has been busy; here’s the Reddit logo in WebGL, and an interview he did as part of the JQuery podcast.
• Via Rita Turkowski, a video of Katalabs’ WebGL gallery-builder as showed at the GDC. You can try out an early preview of the builder here.
• Two more videos to finish off (with bonus techno soundtracks) — some new and upcoming features in SceneJS: a COLLADA model of a house in the current version 0.7.2, and bounding volumes in the next version.