WebGL Car Viewer | Hacker News Reader

WebGL Car Viewer

carvisualizer.plus360degrees.com

150 pointsbriangonzalez43 comments

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Three.js lists about half a dozen of car related demos including the one featured

http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/

A real Camaro: http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/examples/webgl_loader_ctm_...

A car you can actually control: http://helloracer.com/webgl/

Or even two of them: http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/examples/webgl_materials_c...

Wow, I've been out of the loop on how good WebGL is.

http://www.webgl.com has a decent collection of demos (full disclosure: self plug)

My favorite WebGL thing: the GLSL sandbox

http://glsl.heroku.com/

I knew about the last one, and it was unplayable on my mid'09 13" MBP and its 9400m. I don't know if it's a few Chrome updates or the bump to Mountain Lion but it's smooth as butter now (performance of [0] improved a lot too, it was John Woo slo-mo, now it's realtime — although dragging the ball is a bit jerky).

[0] http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/

Wow, color me incredibly impressed.

I'll second that. I don't think I've ever interacted with such a complete real-time light simulation, webGL or otherwise: It's simulating refraction of objects seen through the surface of the water (something I've wished game engines would do ever since I first dove into a flooded cavern in the original Tomb Raider), it's simulating diffraction of light through the waves onto the surfaces below, and it's simulating radiosity diffusion between adjacent surfaces (move the ball toward a wall and watch as not only its shadow grows but its own surface facing that shadow darkens as less light is reflected back).

mrdoob never fails to blow my mind... wow.

Beautiful demos like this make me even sadder that Microsoft don't plan on supporting WebGL in IE.

That's actually a good thing. I don't see "casual" sites using WebGL any time soon, more likely it'll be professional or purpose built sites (like online design software). Installing another browser will be a very small hassle for someone who wants to use such services online. Microsoft is simply not in the position of deciding which standards will live or die any more.

It's just another nail in the coffin of IE. The sooner we get rid of it, the better.

Actually, it's possible to make WebGL run in IE as well, with a plugin which automatically installs on the users system. Its name is IEWebGL and works quite nice: http://www.iewebgl.com/ CopperCube for example is using this: http://www.ambiera.com/coppercube/faq.html#iewebgl

They like to do this. They stand firm. They hold out and insist that they probably have a better idea. 5 years later... everyone laughs at the browser that is only used by people that either have no choice, or are too old to really understand what they're using. Go ahead Microsoft. Keep making dumb choices. I doubt anyone with a brain even notices.

It looks very nice and is a good demonstration of what possible but there underlying resolution of the car is quite low and so the reflection of the ceiling lights aren't smooth. With a highly reflective rendering like this you do really need a large number of triangles and I'm not sure that WebGL in the current browsers can support that well. Would love to see it get even better!

Having said that, its a good job!

I have recently been prototyping a WebGL based CAD viewer at work, and I could render 4-5 million triangles (that's around 50 MB of geometry data) on a late-2010 MacBook Air 11". Performance is very good on all browsers (FF, Chrome, and Safari), but FF seems to outperform the rest.

I would love to see a webGL CAD viewer, as a product designer I spend most of my day with Solidworks open and have often thought a tool to convert iges/step files into a format for webGL would be really good!

Coming soon! I am just getting the payment system in place and some legal issues need sorting out. The website is Babel3D - http://www.babel3d.com. Right now it only converts for visualization on mobile apps though.

What would be really interesting would be a client-oriented preview interface from these guys.

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2012/8/10/teamup-launch...

Number of triangles isn't going to factor much into webgl performance; because you're just batching static geometry, so your only performance bottleneck is really the hardware. Where the limitations of the browser are going to come in are on things that spike CPU work or can't be batched easily. (Simulations and more dynamic scenes)

Works perfectly with Nightly (2012-09-28) on Windows 7. Why no fullscreen support for Firefox? It support fullscreen api (http://caniuse.com/#feat=fullscreen) and as far as i can see it's just as stable as chrome.

If this supports fullscreen in chrome but not firefox, it's likely a bug in the demo. Other demos show fullscreen working great in both.

You should make use of Firefox's support for fullscreen: http://caniuse.com/#feat=fullscreen I just got a "not supported" message on FFx 16.

Otherwise, looks pretty slick!

What, no BMWs? (my monocle pops off).

This is an outrage!

I second that.

and poor Aston, what did they do to him.

and that is not a SLK500 rather an SLR

It's interesting that it's listed as an SLR in the "Credits" but as an SLK500 in the car list.

It's only a matter of time, Microsoft and Apple won't have a choice but to adopt WebGL.

It's amazing what WebGL and Javascript can deliver, we've got models with hundreds of thousands of polys showing off really nicely on our site. If you like this car, check out the hundreds of models like it in Verold Studio - http://studio.verold.com

For example, check out this future bike live in 3D: http://studio.verold.com/projects/505cda001499740200000028/s...

What do you mean by Apple won't have a choice but to adopt WebGL? I can run WebGL on Safari without any problems.

Probably he means WebGL support in iOS? Apple seems to be holding this off for some reason.

In Safari, you have to enable Developer mode and then turn on WebGL. In iOS, WebGL is only available in iAds. WebGL is certainly a threat to Apple's marketplace, but it's also an essential component of HTML5. Hence my prediction that they will have to come around.

Gold ferrari, gold rims = awww yeeeeeee

Super impressed by the quality of this - I've played with webGL a good amount and I don't think I've seen anything this clean and bug-free. Super props to the author

Looks good. Does anyone know what BRDF was used? Or the technique for the reflections? I think you could get away with cubemap reflections for this particular scene.

http://benvanik.github.com/WebGL-Inspector/

I just realized that at some point in my 30s, I'll get a kick out of playing a version of Halo rewritten in Javascript.

It's unlikely that MS will release anything in WebGL let alone Halo.

Not quite the same, but I have found http://www.quakelive.com fun and practical.

Hear music, no visual. FF 15.0.1

its nice but the atmosphere is all wrong. With something like this, I expect terrible hiphop music and a user-controllable Vin Diesel driver.

Doesn't work for me at all on Chrome 21.0.1180.89

You should update then. Chrome is at 22.0.1229.79 for me.

Apparently not. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4587264

Very well done and performing pretty well.

Very impressive.

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