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Comment by alt_ | Hacker News Reader

This is the first use case of 3D/WebGL for actual web sites that I've found worthwhile. I could even see myself using a stereoscopic screen to browse sites like these. No flashy fullscreen effects or epilepsy-inducing adverts, just clean 3D pop-ups to highlight content.

It's just a shame that anti-aliasing isn't forced on by default; jagged edges should really have been left behind years ago.

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What? How is this possibly 'worthwhile'? All it does is add some irritating effects to logos on a webpage.

Huh? How are the pop out effects shown on the demo page irritating?

I can't tell whether you're being sarcastic.

How are they not?

Seriously though, "irritating" is a matter of opinion. Explaining why something is irritating is like explaining why something tastes good.

Maybe my parents would think they're really neat and cool (as they have mentioned in similar things before to me), but I would object to that. While their claims of thinking that are perfectly rational from their own viewpoint (because they consider it novel and unique), I see it as an anti-pattern and distraction that gets in the way of productivity.

The effect conveys geometries and dimensions when activated that would otherwise require an animation. For simple objects this could save bandwidth and be resolution independent.

While I do not advise using it everywhere, it is just one use case that I do not have a problem with and that could be a useful part of a designer's toolset. Think of it as a 3D version of animated SVG. I only noted this because most other uses of WebGL are unnecessarily flashy and irritating.

And flatten the battery on my laptop/phone faster.

It's lame, bring in a whole bunch of heavyweight javascript for some annoying hover effects (the demo page is more than half a MB of JS, with threejs minified being 400K by itself.) There's no way that's a smart business move by any means, when we know that load time is inversely proportionate to sales.

Using Chrome 28 - shouldn't the anti aliasing work out of the box? This demo looks very jagged for me as well, to the point I'm sure people will react negatively to it.

Strange, because anti-aliasing is clearly on for me by default. Chrome 28 on OS X.

Antialiasing is actually the default for most WebGL implementations I've tested, but it's not possible to turn it on everywhere. There are still lots of devices out there too weak to actually do antialiasing for everything, along with buggy drivers that crash or produce garbled output in some scenarios with AA on. AA can also introduce artifacts into certain rendering algorithms designed for use without AA (it produces some really strange inputs in your pixel shaders...)

Yes, generic anti-aliasing for 3D graphics isn't as straightforward as modern desktop GPU's make it appear to be.

The multi-sampling approach that desktop hardware uses is basically brute-forcing it, and doesn't work on mobile hardware that uses tile-based deferred rendering. Subpixel rendering only works for contours. Texture filtering requires you to model everything using bitmaps. Solutions that intelligently combine different techniques to get antialiasing without requiring MSAA have to be implemented manually because AFAIK OpenGL does not have any API's to do anything other than full-scene antialiasing using multisampling (GL_POLYGON_SMOOTH is basically useless, if it even exists in OpenGL ES).

Antialiasing is actually a pretty hard topic unless you have lots of fillrate ;-)

>Subpixel rendering only works for contours.

That's simply not true. It works for any non-horizontal edge.

If you have touching faces rendered using different shaders, different lighting/material properties and/or different textures, internal edges rendered using subpixel antialiasing will look bad, which is why FSAA using multisampling is the preferred way to antialias on any system that has sufficient fillrate.

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