Learning WebGL

• So, the big news is of course the release of the beta version of Firefox 4 (previously known as 3.7). Mozilla have been making a lot of noise about the inclusion of WebGL in this release (though you still need to switch it on with the about:config flag webgl.enabled_for_all_sites), so it looks likely that it’s going to be there in the final release.
• Some of the publicity for the new beta was at Mozilla Summit 2010; here’s a video of Vladimir Vukićević’s talk. Links to all of the demos he shows in it are on this page on his site; looks like there are some adaptations of Pl4n3 and Jacob Seidelin’s stuff there.
• One thing Vlad showed was a very cool WebGL platformer, which Paul Brunt has written to celebrate the release of GLGE 0.5
• I believe this was also shown at the Mozilla Summit: a demo with many contributors, far too many to list here: Flight of the Navigator. (Does anyone know of a link to a live version of this?)[UPDATE: a live version is on its way.]
• On to non-Mozilla-related news: some competition for WebGL? There are early indications that the next version of Flash will have support for 3D graphics.
• I really enjoyed this post by Brandon Jones: why the biggest threat to WebGL gaming is neither Microsoft nor JavaScript performance, but instead the very user interface style that makes browsers so useful.
• From Paul Rouget, a nice simple example that should help anyone who wants to use videos as textures in their WebGL scenes.
• I suspect you need to know more about the background than I do to know what’s going on here: RADIUS network traffic analysed, sent to the browser over WebSocket, and displayed in 3D using WebGL, by Takanao Endoh.
• Matthew Postill has created a C3DL-based system called SceneCreator which lets people create 3D browser-based scenes to share with others. Looks like fun!
• Evgeny Demidov has written a very attractive particle-based fire demo.
• I don’t know whether I’m more impressed by the (apparently) 1.8 million polygons in this demo, or the domain name ;-)
• From the WebGL dev list, a terrain generator.

• Lots of good stuff from last week’s WebGL Camp: there are videos for all, and copies of the slides for most, of the presentations up on the website. Well worth looking at!
• One great bit of news that Paul Brunt mentioned in his presentation, and has since blogged about, is that he’s ported the jiglibflash physics library over to JavaScript so that you can use it in WebGL. He’s getting pretty impressive performance!
• There are some translations of the tutorials from this site into Polish over at w3center.pl, including a run though the troubleshooting stuff that recently landed in lesson 0.
• A case where the backstory is more perhaps interesting than the demo: a cloud of particles from Matthew Papakipos, a high-flying Google Chrome engineer who tweeted about having done this just before dropping the bombshell that he was moving to Facebook after being head of the Chrome OS project.
• An interesting tweet from Henri Sivonen: “Cool. Street View using WebGL. Degrades gracefully to a static cylindrical movable image when WebGL isn’t available.”
• Another Quakesque demo from Brandon Jones: a Quake 2 level in WebGL, along with an explanation of why doing such a thing is a terrible idea :-)
• This is an interesting application for WebGL — Diego Cantor’s doing medical imaging (YouTube video only, unfortunately).
• Here’s a very pretty WebGL Earth.
• From China, an attractive ripple effect demo.

Lots of news for today:

• Changes in the WebGL Working Group: Mozilla’s Arun Ranganathan, who was chairing the group, is stepping down, and Vladimir Vukićević is coming in as interim chair until 1.0 of the spec comes out.
• It was amusing that Apple’s demo of the new HTLM5 standard was branded Safari-only, and sad that it didn’t include WebGL. Google’s response, HTML5 Rocks, has neither problem (the San Angeles demo is on slide 25 of the “Interactive Presentation”).
• On the subject of animation, this is rather impressive: from the Biomotion Lab at Queen’s University in Canada, here’s a WebGL walker. I highly recommend you switch on the “Bones” toggle, and then play with the sliders — hours of fun to be had…
• Unsuprisingly, California continues to be a good place to be for WebGL meetups… SIGGRAPH 2010 will be in Los Angeles on 26-29 July, and Khronos will be holding a WebGL BOF session.
• CopperCube 1.4.1 has been released, and now supports animation
• The online WebGL 3D editor 3DTin now supports orthographic projections — maybe not as attractive as perspective views, but often much easier to work with when editing models.
• Dennis Ippel’s come up with another WebGL tutorial, this one covering getting started with GLGE.
• Another tutorial: 3dgames.pl, a Polish-language site covering 3D game development and WebGL in particular, has a promising tutorial on collision-detection, physics and reading the keyboard in WebGL games.
• A new project: Lively Goes 3D from Tampere University of Technology “aims for the development of a compelling 3D mashup environment”. It’s based on earlier work at the university and at Sun, and they have a simple WebGL-based version up and running.
• Andor Salga’s been busy, with release 0.1 of the XB PointStream tool he’s been working on to display high-quality point clouds in the browser (demos here, though be warned that they take a long time to load!), and also extending Processing.js to support transparent WebGL canvases (with, for example, HTML text underneath).
• This is an interesting proposal, I don’t know whether I think it’s a good idea or not: the guys behind Stack Overflow are asking for ideas for single-topic equivalents of the generic SO site, and Rahul Hamdapurkar has proposed that they create one for WebGL.
• DaveR53 commented on last week’s post about the N900 pointing out that the browser also supports HTML events when the phone’s orientation changes: someone’s now put together a video showing a cube that rotates when the phone does. There are some really interesting possibilities for web-based augmented reality here.
• Also on the N900, the X3DOM team blog that they’ve confirmed that their library works on the phone, including animation and sound.
• And in further X3DOM news, here’s an online X3DOM editor from Michael Zoellner.

Lots of new links since last time!

• This is a really cool idea — via the WebGL developer list, here’s a WebGL 3D model editor. Blender, watch out :-)
• Here’s a warning: as Chris Marrin says on the Public WebGL list, pretty much all WebGL content on the net right now (my own tutorials included) is invalid! Historically we’ve been able to get away with certain kinds of mistakes because the browsers haven’t been thoroughly validating our shader language; these mistakes could cause all kinds of problems when running on mobile devices in the future. Quite rightly, the browser developers will be tightening up the shader validation soon; an upcoming release of Minefield will make tight validation optional, which will give us all a chance to fix stuff. A little while after that, validation will be on by default.
• A very nice CubicVR demo, this time demonstrating bloom (where light from bright things “leaks” onto nearby dark areas).
• First steps for Andor Salga’s XB PointStream project: 150,000 surface “splats” with lighting, partitioned in an octree.
• From Brandon Jones, an animated character that you might find familiar…
• What looks like another cool demo from Pl4n3, this time based on GLGE — unfortunately my display driver crashed before displaying it :-(
• Another 3d-test interview, this time with Denny Koch of EnergizeGL.
• Using Processing.js, some jellyfish created with Bezier curves.
• Interesting: the first steps in a WebGL implementation for Node.js, a server-side JavaScript framework. As the author says, “[i]magine easily writing games or multimedia applications that run in the browser and on the desktop without changes.”

• Big news: apparently, the most recent firmware update for the Nokia N900 mobile phone enables WebGL in its (WebKit Firefox-based) browser. I have an N900, and hope to have some first-hand news soon. [UPDATE: it works! More in a separate post later.] [UPDATE: here's my list of demos that work on the N900]
• Ilmari Heikkinen has released a stereoscopically-rendered whale.
• A demo from PlayWebGL: a GPU game of life, with attractive colours.
• Via Henrik Bennetsen, a presentation from the Google I/O conference on new HTML5 features, including a look inside the GWT Quake implementation.