Learning WebGL

Lots of good stuff today!

• A gorgeous WebGL experience from French web agency ultranoir: Nouvelle Vague.
• VideoRiot lets you mash up videos in your brower, using YouTube as the source.
• From Florian Boesch, a great demo of ambient occlusion, an impressive lighting technique.
• Project Nell aims to produce a 3D learning environment for One Laptop Per Child (the laptops don’t support WebGL yet, but there are plans to change that). Here’s a collection of mostly-WebGL demos showing the direction they’re going, with a bit of help from three.js.
• Another nice demo from Xavier Bourry at Spacegoo — a beach scene with animated water.
• Ralph Schurade has built a WebGL interactive version of an upcoming paper about the mechanisms of language processing in the brain. It has “the functionality of a basic mri viewer”, with “textured slices, surfaces and fibre tracts”.
• This is cool: My Robot Nation lets you design your own toy robot online (using WebGL, of course), then realises it with a 3D printer and mails it to you.
• A new framework: ChesterGL is a 2D game library based on WebGL, with some fallback to Canvas 2D when WebGL isn’t enabled.
• GLmol is a WebGL molecular viewer
• An interesting experiment in 3D mapping by Jaume Sánchez Elias.
• Another Chester: Chester the Dog definitely writes better tutorials than I do.
• Serious games need full-screen graphics; Brandon Jones has been experimenting with a new API providing that (currently Webkit-only). Read the full article including the corrections he added later.
• Relatedly, mouse lock is another new API that will be useful for games: here’s David Humphrey’s description of why it’s useful, and how and why he and his students will be building it into Mozilla.
• Thanks to OutsideOfSociety, we now only need someone to create WebGL badgers and mushrooms.
• Here’s a nice simple demo of motion blurring in WebGL by Dmitri Shuralyov.
• Jacob Seidelin, who write some of the best early WebGL demos, has written a book HTML5 Games: Creating Fun with HTML5, CSS3 and WebGL. It should be well worth reading.
• Not strictly WebGL, but if you’ve not seen it then you should take a look at Adobe’s CSS shaders proposal, which would allow you to use the OpenGL ES shader language we all know and love to modify normal web page elements. Definite possibilities there!
• Learn OpenGL ES is branching out into WebGL lessons; here’s the first one, along with a useful post about how to put WebGL canvases into Wordpress blog posts.