Learning WebGL

We’ve just launched a new product at work — more about that in a few days, it’s not directly WebGL-related but might be of interest to quite a few readers here Anyway, it’s taken up rather a lot of time, hence the lack of posts here for the last few weeks… In the meantime, there have been a whole bunch of interesting WebGL posts since my last roundup:

• The biggest news is that the Mozilla and Chrome teams have turnedwill be turning WebGL on by default in their latest next beta builds, for versions 4 and 7 respectively. It’ll be great to be able to replace all of the complicated “getting a WebGL browser” instructions with the words “use Chrome or Firefox” Still, personally I’ll be sticking to the nightly builds for now…
• On the subject of the Chromium team, if you’ve not seen their latest WebGL demos yet, you really should! (Try hitting “L” while looking at the aquarium for a Dr. Evil moment — thanks to Dion Almaer for the easter egg tip
• GLGE now has LOD support, so that you can specify less-detailed models for objects in your scene that are far away, switching over automatically to more-detailed models when they get closer.
• Brandon Jones explores how much WebGL you can fit into 1kb of HTML code.
• WebGL minigolf using JigLibJS — distressingly playable
• Via xguru on Twitter, it looks like Rocket Engine, a browser-based gaming framework, is getting WebGL built in. Anyone know any more? In the comments, rockmkd explains that Rocket Engine is not canvas based, and xguru was just hoping that it will.
• From Aleksandar Rodic, some attractive WebGL jellyfish.
• There’s been some interesting and sometimes heated discussion of colour spaces on the Public WebGL list, and Ilmari Heikkinen has blogged a good summary of the issues.
• Brandon Jones and Firdaus Zailani point out that WebGL might a good way to write a killer entry for the Mozilla Labs Game On browser-based gaming competition…
• Some great WebGL presentations; first up, Henrik Bennetsen on HTML5, WebGL and Virtual Worlds.
• Next, Ilmari Heikkinen did a presentation on WebGL at Frontend Finland; here’s his blog post with a link to the original Finnish slides, and here’s his translation into English.
• Another WebGL presentation, by Brad Midgley. This is from the Ruby|Web Conference, with a cool Processing.js Pong demo.
• This looks pretty useful: the WebGL Control Panel, an add-in for Firefox for controlling, testing and debugging WebGL apps in your browser.
• Rita Turkowski has spotted what might be the first WebGL job on Elance: “Need for a Backend Server for WebGl Validator“
• For Japanese readers — some WebGL seminars. The people concerned asked for permission to include translations of my lessons, which I was happy to give — it’ll be interesting to see what comes out!
• A new WebGL library: WebGLet, “getting rid of the boring bits of WebGL”.
• And some WebGL utilities: PreGL is a graphics math and WebGL library. (Once again via Henrik Bennetsen)