WebGL Equation Plot | Hacker News Reader

WebGL Equation Plot

vicapow.github.io

63 pointsjseip16 comments

This reminds me my biggest hobby project when in high school; I was so fascinated with 3D plots that I spent I don't know how much time to create a compiler from math formulas to to machine code so that I could plot this kind of things on my Amiga (without a math coprocessor). What amazes me the most is not that you can now animate that in real time in an interpreted language in a browser, but how easy is to learn all these things through the internet, instead of having to find a book in the bookstore and hope that it could have what you needed...

Cool! I made half a sphere with 0.5+sqrt(0.2-((x-0.5)^2+(y-0.5)^2)). If there was a way to do a mirroring on the xy plane (as in a +/- z value) it could be a full one.

that's so cool! btw, you can link to your equation here

    http://vicapow.github.io/equation-plot-webgl/index.html#0.5%2Bsqrt(0.2-((x-0.5)%5E2%2B(y-0.5)%5E2))

edit: but HN seems to be messing up the urls :(

I managed to modify yours to make a full sphere with a bad hack: http://vicapow.github.io/equation-plot-webgl/index.html#0.5%...

There's probably a better way to choose which points go above and below than random(), but it works.

Edit: Got it to work non-randomly. Adjacent dots alternate above and below: http://vicapow.github.io/equation-plot-webgl/index.html#0.5%...

It seems the result is a complex number. Fiddled around with it a bit until I got lucky and got the plane to disappear.

http://vicapow.github.io/equation-plot-webgl/index.html#0.48...)

http://vicapow.github.io/equation-plot-webgl/#number(%220011...

If anyone is interested in a full-featured library for this sort of thing, see MathBox.js

https://github.com/unconed/MathBox.js

for comparison, here's a version in SVG: http://vicapow.github.io/dz/example/equation-plot.html

Weird question, but, did you possibly, by chance, develop/debug this in part in a café in Berkeley on Saturday with a copy of Think Bayes on the table? 'Cause I may have been sitting at the next table if so.

omg! yeah, i was. small world. do you go to Berkeley?

Freakish--I don't go to Berkeley, hadn't been to that cafe before! Anyway, woot, very cool hack! (And cool enough for the glance at it to stick in one's memory for a few days, apparently.)

Half-cone and triangle.

  http://vicapow.github.io/equation-plot-webgl/#sqrt(-(x*x)%2B(x*y))

very cool!

This produces a nice flared tube or "neck"

http://vicapow.github.io/equation-plot-webgl/#0.1*cos%286.28...

0.1cos(6.28x)tan(3.14y)

I'm getting "Uncaught TypeError: Cannot call method 'getExtension' of null" in Chrome 32.0.1700.55 beta - anyone know what that's about? My chrome://flags/ are all set to default.

This is really nice, already sent in a pull request! I've been meaning to learn about WebGL for a while, I think I'll give it a try this weekend.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com