Ask HN: Any cool ideas for an M.S. thesis involving WebGL? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any cool ideas for an M.S. thesis involving WebGL?

Hi all! I have to write a masters thesis and I want to use WebGL as my main technology.

It's such a new technology.

I was wondering if anyone had any cool ideas for a thesis involving webGL?

My first instinct is to write a game but I am but one person.

Thanks in advance.

You are right, a game would be a tonne of code. Massive encouragement on the WebGL, btw, 3D made me feel like a kid again. Here is a project I have always wanted to do: given a wire-frame, simulate the resulting minimum soapfilm surface algorithmicaly. I believe that maximizes the fun/LOC ratio. You might look at Javelin, btw, a ClojureScript lib.

A good example of the creative flexibility that GL allows: http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light

That game looks really cool. Very original idea.

Maybe master thesis work differently from where you are...but I think any thesis should start with defining your research problem, and working from their to define the tools you will use to investigate the problem.

Picking the tools first is backwards.

In any case, I think compiling C++ to javascript/webgl using emcscripten is an interesting space, and surely there are a lot of open problems in this area.

I think the tech could play a major part of your research especially if it's as new as WebGL.

Off the top of my head:

Make a 3d website.

Make a game (Easier then it sounds)

Make a scripting language that compiles to WebGL.

Good luck!

> Make a 3d website.

It might be interesting to make a 3d interface for HN. Articles with more activity float in the foreground, and articles with less activity float in the background.

Or articles with comments from people you score highly float out more?

I've seen some examples of WebGL being applied to medical image visualization, but my gut tells me this area is still ripe for contributions.

I'm really interested in seeing some of those examples. If you don't remember the links, can you point me in the general direction?

Here's one example, from a research institute where I studied years ago: http://www.imaging.robarts.ca/~dcantor/

You might also ask this question on the WebGL Developers Google Group:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/webgl-dev-list

Take a look at acko.net for some inspiration!

Hey thanks yall for the ideas!!

Some good stuff to think about.

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