Another busy week…
- Three new freelance gigs on the WebGL Jobs board: from Massiveholdings.ca, a private listing, and from Universal Music Group.
- WebGL Enabler “is a tweak for jailbroken iOS devices which enables WebGL for all WebViews, including those of Mobile Safari and any application embedding WebKit.” By Cody Brocious.
- Really really cool: Kaazing, who produce a real-time WebSockets-based messaging system, have produced a version of HelloEnjoy’s HelloRacer driving game that you can view on your computer and drive with your phone! (via Realtime Web Dev)
- Spectrascade is an awesome particle-based music visualiser by Jeshua Bratman and Anna Chen.
- VivaGraphJS, by Andrei Kashcha, is a JavaScript Graph Drawing Library which uses WebGL for rendering. Here’s a demo page (click on a graph type on the left to see it) and also a cool work-in-progress coloured demo.
- Ten years’ worth of planning and building in Oslo visualised using Three.js by Even Westvang.
- Flash developers may fondly remember the Greensock animation library. It’s now been ported to JavaScript; here’s a couple of neat demos with explanations, using Three.js.
- Things move fast on the Internet. Or maybe it’s just inflation. Anyway, last week we had an 80,000-particle demo, but this week Nutty Software treat us to a million!
- OpenLayers is a JavaScript library for putting dynamic maps on web pages; there’s now work under way to hook it up to the Cesium WebGL Globe code. Here’s a very early prototype. (via Ashley Mort.)
- GlowScript is an environment by Bruce Sherwood for creating and publishing 3D animations; it’s just reached version 1.0, with “dynamic shapes such as a pulse running along a cloth, compound objects, cloning of objects, enhanced curve object.”
- From David Gillespie, a research student at National Museums Liverpool, a Three.js demo showing a laser-scanned Happy Buddha from the Stanford 3D Scanning Repository.
- A new GLSL demo showing off Light Space Perspective Shadow Maps, from Paul Brunt.
- I can’t track down the author of this one, but it’s presumably someone at Opera: a retro Amiga-style demo in DOM, Canvas and WebGL. Surprisingly, the WebGL one is the slowest, at least in Chrome.
- One for the Star Trek fans: Voyager, by Will Eastcott.
- For Dali fans: Timewarp, a GLSL demo by Paul Malin.
- Another entry in the model-sharing space — Bevelity.
- Similarly: GrabCAD is a site hosting free CAD designs, and now their site offers previews (or perhaps even complete models) via WebGL.
- A WebGL Rubik’s cube by Werner Randelshofer. (via @MathildeVandier)
- Lilli Thompson on HTML5 Rocks explains how to use Chrome’s built-in profiler to speed up your HTML5 game.
- On the subject of performance, here’s some useful advice on using Blender’s “decimate” tool to reduce model-load time from Artillery Games.
- Ah well, it had to happen. “ThreeDee Media offers a WebGL framework for 3D Rich Media advertising and 3D Product Visualization. We bring 3D innovation to the online and mobile advertising industry.” They mention banner ads, will we be punching Suzanne, the Blender monkey? [UPDATE: I feel bad, they seem like nice guys
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Got a WebGL demo you want me to put in next week’s roundup? Leave a comment below, or drop me a line!
Thanks for mentioning us!
The association with the kind of ads you refer to is rather unfortunate.
We dislike those as much as the next person, and we would certainly not be punching Suzanne!
We do believe that 3D can help in creating a more engaging and entertaining type of advertisement and would be a step up from static product images or flash movies.
Anyways, thanks again and keep up the good work with your site, we’ve learned a lot from it!
Hey! Glad to hear that you liked our WebGL racer demo!
A little history on three.js and mrdoob’s tale of getting into coding
https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/issues/1960
Some time ago I announced here the GlowScript project (glowscript.org). A knowledgeable reader commented that the animations were poor because every few seconds there was a freeze during JavaScript garbage collection. I was very puzzled because I had never seen such halts. I just discovered that it was because I had done very little testing on Firefox, which indeed freezes up every few seconds. In striking contrast, animations are completely smooth on Chrome and Safari and Internet Explorer (using the Chrome Frame plugin). I find that Firefox runs significantly faster than Chrome, but at the rather unacceptable price of clunky animations. (I gather that one can minimize this problem by rather complex coding, but I’m unfamiliar with the techniques required. In any case, some experts have commented that this is a system problem to be dealt with at a system level rather than burdening developers with the problem.)
I discovered that I was running an old version of Firefox. The currrent version is very much improved, though it looks to me by eye that the Chrome animation is slightly smoother.
Hi,
I’ve been enjoying this blog, so much that I thought I’d try and learn a bit of javascript (I still haven’t got my head around it’s scoping so you’ll see some weirdness with me not knowing when or how to use ‘this’) and webgl. To make it more fun I’ve tried to test drive it and ended up with the following mess:
http://lampkin.apphb.com/Test/WebGl
I set myself a simple objective of trying to do it without getters and setters, which I failed on.
I think this was more an experience of why test driving an existing implementation around an API is painful and perhaps not that useful (except for learning purposes!). It was hard to abstract away from the details while being forced to learn about the API, not really TDD. My mock usage also feels a bit much, there are a lot of dependencies across classes and a I’m required to mock out a lot of methods on ‘gl’.
It’s certainly not my finest work, but I’ve had fun. Working software as a measure of progress and all that.
I eagerly await a future update from yourself!
Thanks!
For the next roundup
3d (open source) implementation of the Game of Life using webgl
http://lucasnasif.com/
Another version of the game
http://www.clicktorelease.com/code/conway3d/
I saw it via the comments
http://www.reddit.com/r/webgl/comments/v635v/3d_open_source_implementation_of_the_game_of_life/c51wkcz
ps: very nice
What happened with the weekly updates ?
Thanks for the comments, everyone — I’ll be putting a new update together soon. @And1 — life happened
Just incredibly busy.
More updates please (my f5 key is wearing out), life can wait!
Hi everyone, I’d like to introduce my demo.
http://xed-vfx.appspot.com/
It’s a particle effect editor by using webGL.
I hope everyone will enjoy it.
ImageArmada 2.5 now available as 30 day demo includes exporting to webgl
http://imagearmada.co.uk/ImageArmada/ImageArmada-2-Setup.exe
Remember .fbx models imported into Armada must be uv textured mapped.
If exporting out as webgl – you will only be able to see it on your local machine with Firefox….
uploaded to your server Google ‘Chrome’ is good and for Apple Mac ‘Safari’ [might need to be enabled]