Philly ETE 2014 #7 – Look, Ma, No Plugins! – Aaron Mulder
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In the olden days, 3D in the browser meant something antiquated like VRML, Java3D, or other unpleasant formats and plugins. But many of today’s browsers can handle it natively via the HTML5 Canvas and WebGL, based on the popular OpenGL standard. But wait, you say, the only way to program anything in the browser is via JavaScript! Sure, there are libraries like three.js to help, but JavaScript is so…slow. Enter asm.js, a subset of the language specifically constructed for high performance. In this talk, we’ll look at the browser support, APIs, and JavaScript libraries for WebGL, and check out the changes needed to bump up performance with asm.js.