February 2014
Intermediate to advanced
401 pages
11h 20m
English
Content preview from Programming 3D Applications with HTML5 and WebGLBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 2. WebGL: Real-Time 3D Rendering
WebGL is the standard 3D graphics API for the Web. It allows developers to harness the full power of the computer’s 3D rendering hardware from within the browser using JavaScript. Before WebGL, developers had to rely on plugins or native applications and ask their users to download and install custom software in order to deliver a hardware-accelerated 3D experience.
While WebGL is not in the official HTML5 specification, it is shipped with most browsers that support HTML5. Like Web Workers, WebSockets, and other technologies outside the official W3C recommendations, WebGL comes with the package; the developers at Google, Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft, Amazon, Opera, Intel, and BlackBerry consider 3D an essential component for making the browser into a first-class application platform.
WebGL works on the majority of desktops, and almost all mobile browsers.[1] There are millions of WebGL-enabled seats already installed, most likely including the machines you run at home and in your office. There are numerous sites under development, with applications including games, data visualization, computer-aided design, 3D printing, and consumer retail.
WebGL is a low-level drawing API: you supply it with arrays of data and a shader, and tell it to draw. Anyone used to a graphics API like the 2D Canvas will find the lack of high-level constructs mystifying at first. However, there are several open source JavaScript toolkits that provider higher-level access ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.