Month: March 2015

GDC, GTC and 3D city planning lead this week’s WebGL stories.

• CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: WebGL artists, the call for submissions to the 3D Web Fest is open. Deadline to submit is April 8th (project doesn’t need to be done till late April). Don’t delay; submit today!

• Stockholm-based Agency9’s Johan Göransson and team just released support for iOS and Android for a streaming WebGL 3DMaps and City Planner. A 100% plugin- and app- free 3D city planner!
• Version 3 of CL3VER is out of beta and in general release, with GPU-based real time light maps and other great features.
• CopperLicht, an open source engine for WebGL, has just released Version 1.9 of the runtime.
• The Blend4Web team just posted a video to YouTube describing their work on Capri – purportedly the largest WebGL project ever!?
• Missed the WebGL Meetup at GDC? Now you can check out the video.
• Also from GDC, Neil Trevett talks about Vulkan and the latest in graphics from Khronos… possibly a peek at the future of WebGL?
• Can’t make it to the NVIDIA GPU technology conference? Here are the slides from my VR presentation and update on glTF and the WebGL art pipeline.

This week in WebGL: GDC Day One, and put some GLAM into your games!

GDC Report

• At their GDC booth, Mozilla is providing an early look at WebGL 2, the next significant upgrade featuring higher precision in fragment shaders, multiple render targets, geometry instancing and more.
• Also at GDC, Unity Technologies announced that all Unity 5 Pro features are now FREE for small developers ($<100k revenues), including WebGL support! The Gamasutra coverage highlights the licensing changes, and here is a great Mozilla blog piece on the WebGL export feature.
• UPDATE More Mozilla… the browser company announced Oculus Rex, a 100% WebVR experience created in partnership with Aerys and created using the Minko Engine.
• UPDATE Mixamo’s web store user interface now uses WebGL to render character and animation previews, courtesy of Verold. No more Unity plugin!
• Sketchfab has kicked it up a notch by adding physically based rendering to their online viewer.
• In their grand tradition of misspelled deity names, the Khronos Group announced their newest major API: Vulkan. Vulkan (previously code-named glNext) provides high-efficiency access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs used in a wide variety of devices. Let’s hope we see these features in WebGL someday. Live long and prosper!
• Developer Neal Shyam has built the first GLAM-based game, based on code from the Bubble Pop demo.  I am humbled and flattered! Maybe we’ll see more of these soon…

And in other news…

• Check out this awesome playcanvas-based skiing game, based on the awe-inspiring video experience from last year promoting Philips Ambilight.
• webglreport.com now reports WebGL 2 values – thanks to Ed Mackey.
• Russophiles: Sergey Kolosov has now translated ALL of the WebGL lessons into Russian.