Learning WebGL

A moderately busy week…

• Four new jobs at the WebGL Jobs website, all in California: a Hacker for Dreamforge in San Francisco, and a Senior Client Developer, Game Developer and Summer Intern/Game Developer for SocialVilla in Menlo Park. [UPDATE: One more, a freelance gig at Nexus Productions in London, UK]
• Aki A. has created an online viewer for Biovision Hierarchy files, which represent motion-capture data. (via Chrome Experiments, but it works in Firefox)
• A gorgeous car driving demo, with excellent reflections and cool cars, by Jerome Etienne.
• An impressive WebGL 3D fractal-viewing page.
• It’s amazing what you can do with a few lines of GLSL — at least if you’re Anton Platonov. (via Mr.doob)
• A 30,000- or 80,000-particle demo from Emeric Florence (click and drag). I couldn’t get it to work on Firefox, but apparently some people have. [UPDATE nemo confirms it does work for him] (via magenta_placenta on the JavaScript subreddit)
• A nice visualisation of the history of exploration of the planet Mercury, by Nicolas Quinlan.
• Dodge the incoming shapes (with the cursor keys) in Alex Wakeman’s FFT Demo.
• Some nice image-manipulation demos from Thomas Reynolds. (via WebGL.com)
• Tweetopia is a fun Twitter visualiser; change the hashtag in the URL to change what you’re seeing. (via WebGL.com)
• Another demo from Xavier at Spacegoo: a house configurator, where you can design a house based on one of several templates.
• A first WebGL game from x25 Entertainment: Mad Cowboys.
• Not so much a game as a physics demo, but fun to try out: Tobias Artz’s box2d maze.
• Euphony is a (sadly Chrome-only, it would have been top of the list otherwise) MIDI visualizer in WebGL, written by Xueqiao Xu. Code here.
• Another one that’s unfortunately Chrome-only (I think [UPDATE Thorbear and nemo report in the comments that it works for them in Firefox, so it might just be my computer]) — @daniel_hede’s Minecraft Items. (via Mr.doob)
• Registration is now open for WebGL Camp Europe, on 3 July in Muttenz, Switzerland.
• Interested in the history of Three.js? Here’s Mr.doob’s explanation.
• Does adding an HTML-based HUD on top of your WebGL scene hurt the framerate? Brandon Jones thinks not. (via Mariuz)
• Functional programming fans: your wait is over. kri-web is a 3D programming framework written in Dart, with an aim to keep close to a stateless functional programming style. The writeup on the WebGL wiki is a good summary. Now if only it could be rewritten in Haskell…
• A conference: the Graphical Web 2012 will run from September 11 to 14, 2012, in Zurich, Switzerland. (via Ruud Steltenpool)
• Theo Armour’s keen on getting a Wikipedia page set up for Three.js, after the original one was deleted. You can help out.

Got a WebGL demo you want me to put in next week’s roundup? Leave a comment below, or drop me a line!