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What WebGL™

Will Mean

for the Web

Henrik Bennetsen

Ricardo Cabello

Aaron Koblin

Ken Russell

Shanna Tellerman

#webglsxsw

@henrikbennetsen

@mrdoob

@aaronkoblin

@gfxprogrammer

@ShannaWP

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All slides and links available:

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"webgl wiki presentations"

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What WebGL Means for the Web

  • Gives you access to the graphics hardware already in your web browsing device

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What WebGL Means for the Web

  • Typed Arrays
    • Fast data upload
    • Binary data
  • NVIDIA vertex buffer object demo
  • Fast data transfer to and from Web Workers
    • Enables fast multiprocessing on the web
    • Eric Bidelman's HTML5 Rocks post
    • More demos coming soon

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What WebGL Means for the Web

  • WebGL API looks different from most web APIs
  • But structured the way the hardware works
    • Draw lots of geometry at once
    • Execute shaders on the GPU
  • Jeff Muizelaar (Mozilla)'s article on sprite performance
  • WebGL sprite engine (derived from Facebook's JSGameBench)
  • Gregg Tavares' lots-o-images

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What WebGL Means for the Web

  • Integration with HTML
    • Easily use images, videos, canvases in 3D
    • Build UI in HTML; use 3D only where needed

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What WebGL Will Mean for the Web

  • Next iteration of WebGL spec:
    • Multi-canvas: resource sharing between contexts
    • Multi-threading: upload textures and data without blocking main thread
  • Expanded mobile browser support
    • Today: Firefox, Opera Mobile, Sony Experia, BlackBerry PlayBook

8 of 8

What WebGL™

Will Mean

for the Web

Henrik Bennetsen

Ricardo Cabello

Aaron Koblin

Ken Russell

Shanna Tellerman

#webglsxsw

@henrikbennetsen

@mrdoob

@aaronkoblin

@gfxprogrammer

@ShannaWP