August 2012
Beginner
230 pages
6h 4m
English
Content preview from WebGL: Up and Running
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Chapter 1. An Introduction to WebGL
An interactive live jellyfish forest, with hundreds of jellies pulsating and rays of sunlight streaming from the surface of the sea to the murky depths below—under your control. A networked virtual reality simulation of the human body, including the skeletal, circulatory, and other major systems: with your mouse you can peel back the layers of the body, drop pins on interesting parts for future reference, and share a hyperlink with colleagues and students. An immersive massively multiplayer universe, filled with your Twitter friends and followers. No, you haven’t accidentally channel-flipped to an episode of PBS's Nova, and you’re not watching a trailer for the latest Ridley Scott film. This stuff of the future is running in your web browser—right now. It’s called WebGL.
Figure 1-1. WebGL jellyfish simulation (http://chrysaora.com/), reproduced with permission from Aleksander Rodic
WebGL is the new standard for 3D graphics on the Web. With WebGL, developers can harness the full power of the computer’s graphics rendering hardware using only JavaScript, a web browser, and a standard web technology stack. Before WebGL, developers had to rely on plug-ins or native applications and ask their users to download and install custom software in order to deliver a true 3D experience.
WebGL is part of the HTML5 family of technologies. While not in the official ...
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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.