Message: 6 Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:29:08 +0100 From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Subject: [Commons-l] WebGL enabled in Firefox nightlies To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: fbad4e140909220829w6c20fff4n23f5ae4e80b6873d@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/09/webgl-in-firefox-nightly-bui...
This is actually a library usable with JavaScript. But the question does occur to me: is there anything in this we could use? Content it was previously unfeasible to serve?
- d.
We could display 3d world files (VRML and what not. which honestly this whole webGL thing imho seems to vrml/x3d what canvas is to svg - two sides of the same coin. but than again i'm not all that familiar with it). I'm not sure how useful that'd be. Could display 3d shapes perhaps where the user could control the viewpoint. Maybe to make 3d-tour esque things where you could look arround a place. Overall the uses of such a thing seem rather minimal.
-bawolff
2009/9/22 bawolff bawolff+wn@gmail.com:
We could display 3d world files (VRML and what not. which honestly this whole webGL thing imho seems to vrml/x3d what canvas is to svg - two sides of the same coin. but than again i'm not all that familiar with it). I'm not sure how useful that'd be. Could display 3d shapes perhaps where the user could control the viewpoint. Maybe to make 3d-tour esque things where you could look arround a place. Overall the uses of such a thing seem rather minimal.
Displaying 3D models is an obvious and useful one! I wonder if the rendering speed is useful. (The Firefox 3 and 3.5 SVG renderer is usably accurate, but *really slow*.)
We'd probably need a server-side renderer to drop back to. But yeah, that's a use for this.
- d.
Now that i think about it, this could probably be useful for displaying chemical molecules. From what i understand jmol has been on the wishlist for quite a while. I don't know how much would be involved in this, but we could conceivably make a js molecule viewer (on the theory js is better than java). At the very least it could display simple molecules. -- - bawolff Caution: The mass of this product contains the energy equivalent of 85 million tons of TNT per net ounce of weight.
On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 2:31 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/9/22 bawolff bawolff+wn@gmail.com:
We could display 3d world files (VRML and what not. which honestly this whole webGL thing imho seems to vrml/x3d what canvas is to svg - two sides of the same coin. but than again i'm not all that familiar with it). I'm not sure how useful that'd be. Could display 3d shapes perhaps where the user could control the viewpoint. Maybe to make 3d-tour esque things where you could look arround a place. Overall the uses of such a thing seem rather minimal.
Displaying 3D models is an obvious and useful one! I wonder if the rendering speed is useful. (The Firefox 3 and 3.5 SVG renderer is usably accurate, but *really slow*.)
We'd probably need a server-side renderer to drop back to. But yeah, that's a use for this.
- d.
2009/9/23 bawolff bawolff+wn@gmail.com:
Now that i think about it, this could probably be useful for displaying chemical molecules. From what i understand jmol has been on the wishlist for quite a while. I don't know how much would be involved in this, but we could conceivably make a js molecule viewer (on the theory js is better than java). At the very least it could display simple molecules.
:-O That's a fantastic idea!
Get coding ;-)
- d.
2009/9/24 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
2009/9/23 bawolff bawolff+wn@gmail.com:
Now that i think about it, this could probably be useful for displaying chemical molecules. From what i understand jmol has been on the wishlist for quite a while. I don't know how much would be involved in this, but we could conceivably make a js molecule viewer (on the theory js is better than java). At the very least it could display simple molecules.
:-O That's a fantastic idea!
Get coding ;-)
- d.
Chemical models are something with a proven history in this area (usually implemented through java applets if online). Other options would be being able to examine things like moons from all angles (where enough images exist) at admittedly low resolution.
At least would be an improvement on this like this:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iorotateing1day.ogg
I'm sure millhist could find a use for it as well as wider use by people dealing with historical objects that no longer exist (I certainly like to create a model of a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caisson_lock )
There isn't a that much free software that can do modeling 3-D chemical structures (Biclipse may be able to do it haven't tried) otherwise it might be possible to outright buy the rights to some of the older bits of software (anyone know what happened to Nemesis?).
For more complex stuff we would likely have to rely on models by third parties.
The potential problem is that we do not want to become a "only really works in firefox" site. There was enough trouble caused by people building sites that only really worked in IE. We do not want to create the situation anew with firefox.
2009/9/25 geni geniice@gmail.com:
The potential problem is that we do not want to become a "only really works in firefox" site. There was enough trouble caused by people building sites that only really worked in IE. We do not want to create the situation anew with firefox.
And Safari, and Chrome. Webkit and Gecko strikes me as a reasonable spread at first.
Presumably a Java applet will be needed for those who aren't running something that can handle WebGL.
- d.
On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 1:39 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
And Safari, and Chrome. Webkit and Gecko strikes me as a reasonable spread at first.
Note that there's a "competing" Google standard called O3D doing more or less the same thing, although in a different way:
http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/
Afaik Google has said to be commited to supporing both standards. Mozilla is doing the same, although O3D is currently only available as a plugin for Firefox and not as a built-in library like WebGL.
More background info: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/08/webgl-standard-to-bring-3d-w...
-- Hay