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.