Learning WebGL

Still working through quite a backlog, if you’ve sent me a link then don’t worry — it’s on its way!

• I missed this one out last week. Getting lighting to work perfectly is really hard; Florian Boesch has written up the details (with a great, if GPU-heavy demo) of one technique, using Deferred Irradiance Volumes.
• I haven’t been able to try this out on a machine with a webcam yet (long story) but it sounds incredibly neat: Eugene Baumstein and Doug Sherk have built a Tron racer game that you steer by moving your head, using face recognition! Eugene writes: “the map is complete with physics, html5 audio, web workers, web sockets, and video. Its even got a (pretty broken) multiplayer baked in. [We] built this in 24 hours at a hackathon, and we’ve released the source for this too. If it looks any good, let me know!”
• Wow! Space Invaders, in a GLSL shader, by Alan Mackey.
• Cool data visualisation from the Google Data Arts team — a globe showing searches by language. Look closely, it can be hard to distinguish some of the colour differences (I spent a good few minutes wondering why so many people in Russia were searching in English, and I’m still not convinced that they’re showing Polish and Russian in different colours…)
• A little game Xavier at Spacegoo wrote for a friend’s wedding: “Help Régis to rescue Alice while avoiding the monsters.”
• Interesting: “An interactive visualization of government-authorized small arms and ammunition transfers from 1992 to 2010.”
• A nice little teaser for Jerome Etienne’s tutorial at the onGameStart conference in Warsaw later this month.
• A cute platformer made by Fenmar for a Ludum Dare competition: Upgrade.
• A neat 3D graph plotter, by polish designers Webdev 2.0
• For Japanese speakers: this presentation by Akihiro Oyamada looks like a pretty good introduction to WebGL and Three.js, and this book looks interesting: HTML5+JavaScript+CSS+WebGLによる3D Web コンテンツ制作
• An animation of random events from the 20th Century, from zugakousaku.com. (via dotHTML5)
• Interesting: Ben Vanik’s WebGL Inspector plugin for Chrome is fantastic, but it looks like something similar is going to be built in to Chrome 23. Anyone know if it’s the same codebase? It looks pretty similar…

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