Learning WebGL

• The videos of the sessions from WebGL Camp Orlando are now online.
• Hoverbattles by Rob Ashton looks brilliant — and even more brilliantly, he’s blogged about the challenges of getting a multiplayer game working using NodeJS and WebGL — essential reading.
• Proof that slides from a WebGL talk don’t have to use WebGL themselves to be useful from Benoit Jacob — an excellent introduction to the principles behind the API. Relatedly: if you were there and were wondering how to get a Firefox hoodie like Benoit’s, this looks like a good place.
• OpenWorm is a project to completely simulate a very primitive kind of real-world life. They’ve built a cool WebGL viewer so you can see how it’s put together.
• WebGL and webcam demos are coming thick and fast, and you can run them in Chrome Canary with the right flags and certain versions of Opera (I had problems with Opera mobile). Here’s one from Bartek Drozdz.
• On the subject of using WebGL with new web technologies, here’s a list of technologies to use with it by Bruce Lawson.
• Another great port using Mandreel from Baktery: Cube 2: Sauerbraten.
• Cédric Pinson’s ShowWebGL 3D model-sharing site is now Sketchfab, and is fully live — you can upload models in any of a plethora of different formats. Here are a couple of architectural renderings I came across, along with the models from MIOP, a game Cedric wrote back in January.
• Einar Öberg’s procedural eye is strangely beautiful, though not entirely for the squeamish.
• “Geoscope is a web-based, plugin-free JavaScript framework that uses WebGL to visualize time-varying data relevant to the aerospace and defense industry.”
• Hero of Crystalmire is a game from indie developer Miladin Danailov, and is definitely worth a look.
• If you’re trying to convince colleagues that they should use WebGL instead of Flash, you might like to read this article. Basically, in August Adobe will start charging developers 9% of their revenues over $50,000 for content using “premium” Flash features, which include hardware-accelerated graphics. A good day for open Web technologies! (h/t Rémi Arnaud on the Public WebGL list.)
• From Brandon Liu — simple, but maybe useful if you’re cycling in San Francisco.
• More great links over at WebGL.com this week; here are the new ones that caught my eye:
  • Classic demoscene gorgeousness from Jeremy Cowles in Cubic Dub.
  • Pyroxene’s Mini Mass Effect is a homage to the video game.
  • A lovely water demo by Edouard Coulon
  • A very playable driving game: Patai Gergely’s Web Stunts.
  • Simple, but beautiful: Chaser, by Yukiya Okuda.
  • GLmol Molecular Viewer by biochem_fan is exactly what you’d expect.
• On the subject of in-browser chemistry Evgeny Demidov has been playing with the Chemdoodle WebGL components, and has managed to display some standard chemical description files.
• Not WebGL-specific, but definitely relevant: Brandon Jones writes on work he’s done minimising memory leaks and garbage collection in his own RAGE demo.
• Aexol are, among other things, a web design agency. They’ve created a WebGL library called aexolGL, and the demos are here.
• Another WebGL “platform for 3D apps” is Cloudmach. Demos here.
• WebGL doesn’t have to be all about 3D, or even impressive effects. Clibe use it subtly in their online books, just to provide a smooth page-turning animation.

Got a WebGL site you’d like to see in next week’s roundup? Leave a comment below!