Learning WebGL

It’s been a busy week!

• The depthcam, a webcam with depth by George MacKerron, is a great combination of a Kinect, WebSockets, and WebGL. It needs Chrome or Firefox 11. (via @inkoperurena)
• On the subject of webcams, here’s something with a lot of promise on Learning Three.js: using browers’ cameras in WebGL via HTML5’s WebRTC.
• I love this music demo from Echo Nest. (via HTML5 Game Development)
• Paul Brunt’s GLGE now supports better shadows, using variance shadow maps.
• Felix Woitzel’s Fluid simulation with Turing patterns is rather pretty.
• Thanks to John Noel, the Museum of Sheffield website now has a 3D viewer for items in its collection (via Mr.doob).
• Impressive: Streaming data from Blender into Three.js (also via Mr.doob)
• Cute: “San Francisco-based web programmer Ryan Alexander has created a fun web app that creates a ‘little planet’ using photos from any Google Street View.”
• Scary: “Animating a Million Letters Using Three.js“, by Ilmari Heikkinen
• Graphics card too old to support WebGL? The latest Chrome beta can now use SwiftShader for software rendering, meaning that you can see stuff, albeit slowly. [UPDATE: it sounds like it's Windows-only for now.]
• Another headache-inducing demo from Visy: countercomplex visualization.
• Ian Langworth’s Ducks is a fun GLGE-based game, and he’s writing a series of posts on how it was written — here’s part one.
• A little out of date, but fun: Love will Conquer maps tweets about Valentine’s Day (via Engadget)
• If you like these roundups, you might like getting a more frequent WebGL fix at webgl.com.
• Here’s one of the more recent links I picked up from there: Einar Öberg’s Breaking Waves. (via webgl.com)
• Also via webgl.com, AlteredQualia’s new game: CubeOut.
• KickJS is a WebGL based game engine by Morten Nobel-Jørgensen. This cloth simulation is a nice demo of it.
• Another great Three.js demo from OutsideOfSociety: morphtargets.
• Project MIOP by Cedric Pinson is a nice little game, written in 48 hours for Global Game Jam 2012 (explanatory video here)
• A zoomable Google-Earth-like map of Switzerland from FHNW University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (via Tom Payne)
• Visible Patient is “a set of 3D virtual anatomies modeled from medical images of anonymous patients”.
• Another one from Ivan Kuckir: a library to simulate the Flash display API in JavaScript using WebGL. Demos here.
• Interesting: a WebGL Octree visualisation example by Marek Pawlowski.
• Some cool procedurally-generated textures demonstrating the Jax framework (via Jerome Etienne)
• Some Three.js cloth simulations by Mobeen (drawn in WebGL, though the cloth simulation itself is happening in JavaScript)
• One for the mathematically-inclined: Extracting dominant light from Spherical Harmonics.
• It’s a pity this nice little 1K WebGL demo by Brandon Jones couldn’t be entered into the js1k competition.
• Seriously.js is “a real-time, node-based video effects compositor for the web built with HTML5, Javascript and WebGL”, written by Brian Chirls with support from Mozilla.
• “The HTML5 + WebGL Hackathon is an opportunity for San Francisco’s leading web designers, developers, artists and hackers to exchange concepts, projects, and create the next phase of cutting edge web apps.” It’s from 2-4 March, and is free.