
WebGL Shader Toy - AndrewMoffat
http://www.iquilezles.org/apps/shadertoy/
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abi
I don't think enough people are understanding (1) how cool this is (switch to
the tunnel presets and start tweaking the inputs and the shader!) and (2) how
important this is for introducing/teaching people about computer science. Now,
for the first time ever, we can actually teach kids how to program cool 3D
graphics with just a browser (no downloads, no messing with installation
issues, no platform-dependent crap).

I'm planning on teaching a class on WebGL for high schoolers at my university
(for those of you who are curious, it's through this program [1]). All I have
to do is get them to open Chrome/Safari, show them this page and teach them a
few basic concepts about OpenGL/vertices/textures/shaders and they can start
learning stuff on their own. Hacking and tweaking stuff is the most fun way to
learn something. And I think this could be a major milestone for computer
science education.

[1] <http://www.stanfordesp.org/>

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stevenashley
I can vouch for this approach. When I was younger I discovered the magic of
the Winamp AVS Editor. I would not be developing software today if I hadn't of
discovered it.

It should be possible to perform audio analysis within the shader using the
Web Audio API. Google has some demos [1] that seem to do this sort of thing
though they don't seem to work for me.

These new APIs have me quite excited :)

[1]
[http://chromium.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/audio/index...](http://chromium.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/audio/index.html)

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Geee
Thanks, this is like totally awesome. I've often wanted to hack shaders, but
never really got to it. This seems like a nice tool for that purpose.

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tintin
Note that Iñigo Quílez is big in the demo scene:
<http://www.iquilezles.org/prods/index.htm>

It's amazing what he can do in realtime.

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wtracy
Anyone care to explain this to someone who doesn't have a WebGL-enabled
browser handy?

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AndrewMoffat
It's basically an interactive shader editor with some great presets. Let's you
see the code and the resulting effect basically in realtime.

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Zolomon
I've started Chrome with WebGL enabled, but nothing happens when I press the
playbutton? How can I verify that WebGL is truly enabled, am I just not using
the app correctly?

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Zolomon
<http://learningwebgl.com/lessons/example02/> told me it could not initialize
WebGL - think I'm missing the DirectX runtime.

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mieses
along these lines, another nice WebGL demo is fractal.io

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derleth
Fair warning: Some of these really grab CPU cycles.

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endtime
Hmm. Shouldn't it all be on the GPU?

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nossralf
I believe both Chrome and Firefox 4 uses ANGLE if the 3D driver is too old. So
it's possible to only hit the CPU with WebGL in certain instances.

~~~
endtime
Yeesh. Running a pixel shader on a CPU is not a pretty thought.

