Beercamp: An Experiment With CSS 3D

Nice idea but it's super glitchy in both Chrome and Firefox and it's also very laggy in FF. Maybe it's my video drivers? (FF13, Chrome 18, Win7/GTX 570)

Pages using bleeding-edge tech like this need an easily accessible fallback. I can't find any way to access the content from that Beercamp page in a non-busted-3d format.

Article's example of correct 'depth-sorting' isn't demonstrating depth sorting, since depth sorting sorts entire elements to the front/back - interpenetration isn't possible. For interpenetration like he demonstrates, you have to split scene elements up into smaller elements or depth-sort at the pixel level (modern 3d cards do something resembling an approximation of this via the z-buffer).

  The deviceorientation event enables us to pull alpha, beta
  and gamma rotation values. Note that these values are
  relative to the current orientation of the device. The
  image above shows the axes of a phone held perpendicular
  to the ground in portrait mode.

Does 'alpha' really run up-and-down the iPhone while in portrait? The first value is usually the X axis, and usually runs 'sideways' of an iPhone in portrait mode.

  Unfortunately, each browser implements depth-sorting
  differently and, therefore, has its own issues. The best
  we can do to combat the glitchy pop-through of underlying
  elements is to keep planes away from each other.

Is there no way to enable depth testing? ie: Using the zbuffer for per-pixel depth read / test / write? You can avoid depth sorting that way, at a small performance cost, and the result looks better.

That's very impressive work, and the tutorial of the process involved in making it is definitely worth a read too

My favourite thing about this is that here, on my Macbook Pro, my CPU usage stays nice and low, and my fans don't even seem to notice all the 3D happening in my browser.

If this were built in Flash, I'd be worried that looking at it for too long would result in my Macbook burning a hole through my desk.

Tried in Google Chrome 20 on Debian unstable, but it says my browser doesn't support CSS 3D.

I'm all for pushing boundaries, but this is a classic case of form over function.

This seems more responsive than the Flash page turn demos but there are some artifacts when I turn the page (other pages clipping in/out?) and the text isn't anti-aliased.

Wow, this actually works (although it is super slow) in firefox mobile on my droid bionic.