WebGL around the net, 23 December 2012

December 23rd, 2012 5 Comments

A very merry Christmas to everyone! My apologies for the light posting of late, I was catching up and then I got my Ingress invite…

AGI has worked with NORAD Tracks Santa this year to develop a 3D web map that shows Santa’s real-time position on a 3D globe on Christmas Eve. Here’s a blog post with the technical details. (Via Patrick Cozzi)
100,000 Stars is a fantastic visualisation for astronomers or anyone interested in our stellar neighbourhood. (via mariuz)
The is gorgeous: the beginnings of a platform game? A demo using Three.js to render a game made with impactJS + box2D, by Christian Östman and Richard Åström
Stuck on an idea for your next startup? I’m considering a “Big Data tablet network for business execs”, and if you’re looking for similar inspiration yourself, you should try Peter O’Shaughnessy’s Future Technologies Idea Generator.
vw3 is a virtual worlds game engine in being created at Middle Tennessee State University; it supports import from Maya files including skeletal animations, and has a neat little demo of that on the front page, along with a tutorial for the pipeline on YouTube.
Keen on Dart, and keen on Three.js? You should check out three.dart. (via John Davis)
Verold Studio is a tool that makes it possible to collaborate online with 3D models, and it uses Three.js heavily. To give back to the library, they’ve contributed their code that converts FBX files to Three.js JSON files.
SpaceGoo have been featured in these posts many times in the past… and now their complete website interface is in WebGL! Xavier writes “And too bad for those who have not enabled webgl, there is no fallback version for them XD”. Brave
On the subject of WebGL-based sites, onGameStart US is a new conference for web gaming in New York next year, hosted by Michal Budzynski. Collin Hover is putting together a fun 3D site about it.
Some new cool medical imaging, from Tobias Rautenkranz: the standard view is of images on a 2D canvas, but if you go to “Overview” on the right and then “3D”, you get a volume-rendered version.
TeeChart is a JavaScript charting library, with 3D WebGL support using Three.js
glslmin is a CLI tool for minifying WebGL shaders by Chris Dickinson.
I was sure I’d linked to this before, but perhaps not: a Three.js demo rendering Minecraft imagery.
Inka3D, a tool for exporting Maya content for use in WebGL apps, has reached version 1.5. You can now export scenes from Maya to WebGL with no polygon limit, and create characters with hundreds of bones.
Have you written an HTML5 game you’d like people to hear about? Ivan Kuckir has put together Spread My Game, a website where you can post a link.
For readers of Japanese, here’s a tutorial on writing shaders.
10 PRINT is a book about a one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program, and Daniel Haehn has knocked together a quick 3D version of the pattern that program creates using XTK/WebGL.