Learning WebGL

• From Pavel Zyr, a neat artificial life experiment using Three.js
• Something very cool from Xavier Bourry (unfortunately Chrome 22+ only) — a motion-tracking system that uses your webcam to control a WebGL scene. In his own words, “I did it in 2 days so it is not the most reliable application of the world, but it is funny ” There’s a video here.
• Also from Xavier, a 3D chess game where you can see a webcam view of your opponent. Video here.
• ThreeDeeMedia are working on a WebGL engine of their own for “immersive 3D Rich Media advertising and 3D visualization” (but in a good way) and here’s a work-in-progress example of the kind of thing they mean — an in-browser interactive colour-picker and display for Beats by Dre headphones. Apparently there’s an online editor coming soon, too.
• In general, it’s a waste of CPU to use a generic hard-to-parse format like COLLADA if you’re sending models from a server that you control to a client WebGL app that you control. The normal recommendation is to just use your own format, probably based on JSON. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a standard format for that? There’s now work in progress to create one.
• From Thomas Kjeldsen, an interactive view of data about Danish municipalities.
• A topical demo from Callum Prentice: Storm Tracks WebGL.
• One demo that I’d never seen before on this Japanese roundup: the Sunlight Graffiti sphere by Olafur Eliasson, which displays images contributed by people who saw the original physical installation at the Tate Modern art gallery.
• I was sure I had mentioned this before, but I can’t find the post… anyway, if you’ve not read the WebGL tutorials over at Nettuts+, then they’re worth a look. Here’s part III, lighting.
• Also from Japan (and in Japanese) — part 5 in a series of articles on using Three.js.
• If you’re using Windows to code WebGL and need to know how to set up a web server, here’s a helping hand from Eric Haines.
• Shashi Sharma’s Dart + WebGL lessons continue: Part 2.
• A bit of reflective demoscene fun from (I think Anne Jan Brouwer) (coarse language warning…) (via paulo)
• Interesting: Anthony Pesch is doing a manual line-by-line port of Quake 3 to WebGL; here’s a recent tweet with a link to a screenshot of the work in progress. (via mariuz)
• On the subject of ports, if you’re able to use Microsoft technologies then Matthias Ferch has build a new vector/matrix library in their superset of JavaScript, TypeScript. It can be compiled to JavaScript, so it should work fine with browsers that support WebGL after that.

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!