Render 3D Objects in JavaScript
Check out this demo of a 3D rendering engine concept that the Useless Pickles blog hacked up in JavaScript. It works by manipulating the borders of page elements so that they appear as triangles — which means it could conceivably be used to render objects of some complexity, since most 3D objects are rendered out of meshes of triangles. Of course, JavaScript probably doesn’t scale to that point, but it’s a very interesting hack nonetheless. Nice stuff. [Via Hackzine, from whom I’ve stolen the image above.]
Comments are closed. Trackbacks are closed.
Feeds
I’m just the designer here, so maybe I’m mixing up java with javascript, but I’ve seen stuff that makes this look like a text document. You can visit my site to see what I mean.
Apologies for sounding so critical, I am just very surprised at the low expectations of 3D on the web.
“so maybe I’m mixing up java with javascript”
Yep. Java is pretty close to having the same capabilities as any other desktop program. Javascript, on the other hand, is extremely underpowered due to both the nature of its syntax, and the fact that it’s read off line by line by an second program, which in turn might need additional interpretation or suffer additional limitations. There are extended versions which are closer to actual java in terms of how they run, and these show abilities closer to what you brought up. For what it is, anything involving graphic manipulation is pretty impressive for normal javascript. Not so much for the end effect, simply for having pushed the boundaries of some fairly severe limitations.
In that case, I can see how impressive it really is then. Kudos, Pickles!
Lots of folks have created little 3d renderers using javascript and the canvas tag, which both Firefox and Safari implement. Here’s my little demo.
Nice find, Mark. And there’s our first 3pointD view on the iPhone?
iPhone, meh. I’m no gadgetboi. I’m sure I’ll get one eventually, though.
No java or flash or plugins on the iphone yet so this javascript hack is the first 3d solution i’ve seen for it. Hey, maybe ajax life should give this a go. :)
I kind of think the one over at sourceforge written by podfun is cool. It uses AjaX3D (X3D written in Ajax) Here is a 3D game demo.
http://ajax3d.sourceforge.net/
Tony Parisi did a quick whitepaper on Ajax3D last year. http://www.ajax3d.org/whitepaper/
Nink