TojiCode Blog about WebGL

Very interesting Blog about WebGL made by Toji. He provides the reader with a lot of inside in WebGL and some cool demos. Check out the quake3 level in WebGL.
Many of the projects are available on github so you can have good look on how things are implemented and optimised.

Javascript based Natural Feature Tracking enables markerless AR in the browser

Coming back from ISMAR 2011 in Basel, I could see a very interesting project by developed by Christoph Oberhofer, Jens Grubert, Gerhard Reitmayr (ICG Graz University of Technology - Austria). It proofs that a reliable and performant natural feature based tracking can actually be implemented in Javascript, HTML5 and WebGL.

There are still a lot of issues especially with the access to live video, but results are already impressive. One has to imagine that this runs entirely on a single website.

The demo runs also on an Android phone with Firefox Beta. Of course not as fluide as on a PC, but still with reasonable interactive framerates. Chrome and Opera alpha were used for the desktop demo. Interestingly it was not running on Firefox on PC.

This work is a very good example of the pace of innovation regarding cutting edge augmented reality applications. There is no need for additional plugins, like FLARToolkit. See my post on that. It runs directly in your browser. It is clearly another possibility to bring augmented reality closer to the a broader public.

We can only imagine what will be possible, when the browser support of HTML5, WebGL and Javascript will be significantly improved and technologies like WebCL will come in play.

Great work

My take on WebGL

Hi there,

in recent news about WebGL, where Microsoft addressed concerns about browser security in its blog post WebGL considered harmful. Basically, they say that due to several reasons, like the inevitable access of WebGL code to the hardware (the graphics card), buggy drivers and other issues, WebGL represents a significant risk to browser security. Therefore,  the MS Internet Explorer will not support WebGL in the foreseeable future.

Who doesn't know WebGL yet, "WebGL is a cross-platform, royalty-free web standard for a low-level 3D graphics API based on OpenGL ES 2.0, exposed through the HTML5 Canvas element as Document Object Model interfaces. Developers familiar with OpenGL ES 2.0 will recognize WebGL as a Shader-based API using GLSL, with constructs that are semantically similar to those of the underlying OpenGL ES 2.0 API. ", which is the definition of WebGL by the Khronos Group.

Of course, that created a some turmoil in the WebGL community and Gregg Tavares from the Google Chrome Dev team came up with a more than clear blog response. Basically, he is saying that Microsoft is all wrong. Every mentioned security issue can be adressed so that browsers can implement WebGL in a secure way.

In any way, Google will continue to push forward Chromes WebGL development (Chrome experiments), as Firefox will do (Mozilla Demos). I predict that MS will finally align, when it will become inevitable for them. This point could be reached, when popular games will be published using WebGL technology. You could play as you go in your browser, no install, no plugin (Flash). But thats still a long way to go.

Since I work for more then 10 years with OpenGL, of course I would like to see WebGL succeed. There are significant challenges on the way, but I clearly follow the position of Gregg Tavares that these problems can be tackled, solutions already exist or will be developed in the near future.

Remixing Reality - Mozillas WebGL Augmented Reality Demo Rocks

Remixing Reality is a WebGL Demo by by ILMARIHEI published at Mozilla Labs that uses, as far as I can tell, Flashs Flartoolkit to create an amazing AR experience inside a website.

[Update] Remixing Reality is indeed a mobile AR application. Try it with Firefox beta on Android! [/Update]

Flash with Flartoolkit allows you to integrate a prerecorded video presenting special markers. Flartoolkit computes then 3D positions of these 2D markers inside the video. These information are used by WebGL to render a 3D object or animation at the markers 3D position. Or in between two markers, in case of the jumping basketball animation.

In the next step they should get rid of Flash and Flartoolkit, so that no plugins are needed anymore to render the website. But this will take again a lot of time until some kind of augmented reality web standard will be established and most of all implemented.

Actually, I'm not 100% sure if they use Flartoolkit, but if you disable Flash the demo doesn't work anymore. So they use Flash at least to render the video. I suppose the tracking is done with Flartoolkit.