art with code

2010-09-16

Frontend Finland WebGL slides



I gave a talk at the Frontend Finland meetup about WebGL. Had a great time, thanks to the organizers! My presentation slides are available here in glorious Finnish. Best experienced with a browser that has a working WebGL implementation (fear not, there's a fallback to plain unadorned HTML). Writing the slideshow app (and the slides) took about three days, with four days of preliminary library work (and the app dev fed into the library too).

Here are some links on the topics covered:

The git repo for the utility library and the presentation can be found here.

The SVG presentation by Matti Paksula was really nifty as well. After the show, we were brainstorming about some kind of a super slideshow where you'd write the slides in HTML (with a nice CSS), then they'd get rendered using SVG / Canvas / WebGL depending on the capabilities of your browser. (What my presentation is doing is parsing the DOM into scene graph nodes, then rendering them using WebGL. Doing a similar system that rendered using SVG wouldn't be too difficult.)

Preserving the clickability of links and other such webness would be problematic with WebGL, but a mix of SVG, CSS 3D and WebGL might get you the best of both worlds: overlay SVG elems on top of the WebGL canvas, change the CSS 3D transform of the elems to match the WebGL scene graph. That'd be a lot like CAKE's mixed HTML/Canvas, except in 3D. If you want fancy FX on your SVG elems while preserving interactivity, you'd render them to textures and put the original element at opacity 0.01 on top of the fancy render, maybe? Or do shaders for SVG?

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