Learning WebGL

Tons of new stuff for today!

• It looks like last Thursday’s WebGL Camp 3 went well! Videos were streamed at YouTube, and archived versions are apparently coming soon.
• In response to the security concerns raised a little while back, Mozilla have switched off Firefox’s ability to use cross-domain images as textures in WebGL. Benoit Jacob’s article is well worth reading, in particular because he describes a simple example of how this could have been used as an attack.
• It’s also worth noting that the WebGL spec has been updated to handle these issues in a more general fashion, including allowing cross-domain textures if the image’s source server says that it’s OK. There’s also more about this on the WebGL Wiki’s excellent security page.
• jebgl is a really interesting idea: if WebGL doesn’t work, then why not fail over to Java?
• @badass_js tweets that Safari 5.1 (currently in beta) has a switch to enable WebGL — can anyone confirm? [UPDATE: confirmed by Kevin Theisen]
• There’s something very endearing about Ed Mackey’s Sproingies.
• GLOW is not a framework, but rather a low-level shader-based toolset for WebGL hackers. Looks interesting!
• Jax, another framework mentioned here recently, has now reached its first official release.
• Here’s an interesting example of how we perceive motion, by Steve Haroz and others.
• I’d not seen this before — a blog with (amongst other things) some WebGL lessons, with detailed descriptions of the underlying mathemetics.
• Pl4n3’s Wloom is moving onwards, and now has a simple pacman-like game mode, and a (slightly headache-inducing) cross-eyed 3D mode.
• “Rutt-Etra-Izer is a WebGL emulation of the classic Rutt-Etra video synthesizer.” Explanation here.
• “Godzi (pronounced “god’s eye”) is free, open source 3D mapping toolkit for WebGL/Javascript.”
• Armin Schüle’s Mesh Builder is an interesting educational tool for getting used to 3D coordinates; try out one of the templates (menu at the top right) to see how its simple programming language works.
• three.js now supports procedural 3D text. Shiny!
• XB PointStream 0.7 has been released.
• 3DTin, the web-based 3D modelling application, is now available in a paid-for “premium” version, with extra features and the ability to save private (non-Creative-Commons) models. This is a nice business model, reminiscent of GitHub’s.
• More interesting WebGL matrix library benchmarking from Stephen Bannasch, with help from Gregg Tavares, on the WebGL dev list. Looks like Closure and TDLFast are currently the best.
• I’ve seen quite a lot of WebGL slideshow demos, but this Flickr viewer is rather fun.
• Some fun old-school demoscene stuff from Saku Tiainen.
• This is a nice WebGL orrery.
• On the subject of the demoscene, Tobias Leingruber has interviewed Visy (whose mkultra demo was featured here two weeks ago)
• Interesting: Processing.js turmites.
• More Russian WebGL lessons — these seem to be aiming (in the long term) to teach how to build a TRON lightcycle-like game, but this one’s just the foundations.
• Another WebGL Tetris, with extra 3D goodness!
• Finally: the parser that converts three.js content for Away3D now supports textures. There’s a nice demo using a BSP (Quake) map.