Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

What problem does this solve for the end user?

Few sites even use WebGL for anything interesting.

I've used WebGL to visualize scientific data. It's nothing special, but the size of the data was large enough that anything like SVG or even Canvas were just slow. There is a lot of interesting stuff you can do even just in 2D in WebGL, because you're closer to the hardware.

What's annoying is that you don't get double precision or any of the compute stuff on WebGL currently. The interesting stuff isn't just graphics, but also doing computations directly in the browser.

Do you have any resources on how you did that? I am developing a web app and I have to visualize a ton of datapoints in a bunch of charts and all the charting libraries I've tried are way too slow. I've been looking for something that could utilize WebGL to speed things up, but haven't found anything so far.

The future of AR/VR exists in 3D worlds. If the web wants to be part of that future, developers will need access powerful 3D APIs. Otherwise, the web will miss another tech wave like it missed mobile (as native mobile was the clear winner over web mobile).

So we are back at VRML?

Which crashed and burned for a reason, it was incredibly pointless, current vr is just a novelty at a 2.0 stage

Yeah i am more excited about the AR glasses Intel recently unveiled than anything VR.

But in the end the problem with be battery life...

Most of these fads seem to be driven not by what's good for the user but what's good for the advertiser and the developer.

Low level GPU access will just make it easier for them to run montero miners on my browser.

There's an ICO for that.[1] Really. They want to offer browser based virtual reality which mines tokens in the background. The initial token sale is in progress now. The virtual reality system appears to be total vaporware.

[1] https://55cancri.io/

Monero isn't efficiently mined on GPUs (it works better on CPUs which is why it's so popular for browser mining already), but other cryptos with equihash algorithms, sure.

I see it more as way to use the GPU to do calculations in JavaScript similar to the speed C/C++ does for crypto-currencies. Yes you can create a Native Application (NaCl) but that is only going to work in Chrome/Chromium browsers and it's compatible variants. Electron and NodeWebkit/NWJS based projects are the most common. But NaCl still doesn't give you direct GPU access because of the sandboxing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com