It’s been over a week since WebGL Camp 4 took place at our Mountain View offices, in the quintessentially Mozillian common space called Ten Forward. The day-long event, organized by the Katalabs’ Henrik Bennetsen, brought together more than 70 technologists and innovators, while others participated via the live #airmozilla stream, which also included presentations via Skype from Paul Lewis in the UK, on a3, a simple 3D engine; and Bartek Drozdz, who lives and works in Los Angeles, on J3d .
Presenters included academics doing surgical simulation research, entrepreneurs building custom robot toys using WebGL, technologists working on DoD contracts for complex simulation environments, new 3D libraries and engines, a couple of young developers who build a Kinect/Audio/WebGL mashup using Cubic.VR, and WebGL offerings and enhancements from the Google, Autodesk and others.
Many of the presentation slides have already been posted to the agenda: these include Brandon Jones, on optimizing texture performance; Lockheed Martin’s David Smith, on the Department of Defense’s virtual world framework; and Mozilla intern Douglas Sherk on Context Loss: The Forgotten Scripts. Nicolas Garcia Belmonte posted a thoughtful recap that covered “stuff I learnt about state-of-the-art WebGL, and the incredible community that we have here in the Bay Area around this technology.” Videos from the event will be posted in early 2012 for archival viewing.
WebGL was practically invented at Mozilla and the creative energy and friendly, collaborative spirit of the WebGL community felt right at home with the quirky and inventive Mozillian ethos.
As Henrik points out in a video soundbyte, making amazing 3D graphics as easy to create as “view source” has got to be good for humanity, right?
After seeing the WebGL nyan cat meme in action, we have to agree.