I am perplexed. Modern games are fantastically more visually appealing and contentwise impressive than this. Modern films utilize computer graphics that are far more impressive still. What is it about single model viewer that makes it headline material? It looks nice, though.
I wouldn't be that dismissive of WebGL precisely. It's a real time graphics driver frontend- a few generations old DX 9 equivalent. Once the shaders and vertices are uploaded to the GPU it's not that consequential what the front end is (within a very charitable margin but still).
I think there is probably a slight shearing layer in the way WebGL integrates with the rest of the browser programming interfaces since it's the lowest level API by far that is exposed. Thus, platform developers who are served ala carte technologies that provide a facade for traditionally very non-trivial things (layout, font rendering and font server, vector graphics rendering, etc. etc.) are suddenly given raw substrate which requires one or two abstraction levels before it's near even SVG which itself can be considered really low level when compared with HTML and CSS.
Traditionally, web developers expect a higher level experience and I think the organizations that usually serve web development services have not taken into account that you need a team of computer graphics experts if one wants to develop anything on top of WebGL.
I'm not dismissing web developers - I'm a graphics programmer myself - but basically, for a non-genious level person like me even grokking the transform stack requires re-orientation every time I'm not touching linear algebra code for a couple of weeks.
It's not a fault of webgl, per se - the other graphics aspects a browser serves do have pretty well figured out conventions and grammar that can be standardized to provide the ala-carte publishing experience a browser provides. But we don't really have any "standard" conventions in computer graphics yet that could be formalized to the level a page layout can. And is it surprising? Publishing has a history as an industrial craft of 500 years. All the conventions have been figured out, and are implementable in algorithmic form.
While realistic art has been practiced thousands of years only 2D graphics really has the industrial basis where we can say that everyone understands and can formalize what they want from their image.
3D graphics is a whole new ballpark. When pixar introduced their shader language 30 years ago they laid out the foundations for formalizing the colorization in visual grammar. The concept of a scene graph is pretty formalized, as well as the perspective projection of a camera. There are some "usual" convention in 3D interaction like the arcball rotation in an editor like scene.
But other than that? The visual world is infinitely rich. We are not ready for a "standard" representation of an infinitely rich universe of expression.
Of course, that does not mean there are no representations that could not be formalized - there are the standard materials of 3D engines and so on, and physical rendering approaches are slowly converging on the best model - but, I don't know if we can ever reach the standardization of desk top publishing in 3D graphics.
Thinking about your comment made me realize that the lackluster performance often seen in WebGL pages has very little to do with overhead in WebGL itself, and a lot to do with the application developer's failure to optimize for performance.
Native Quake III on a Pentium 4-era system was much smoother than most of the WebGL stuff I see on a modern system, but the fact that a WebGL demo [1] of a subset of Quake III is very smooth seems to support this idea.
You make a lot of good points about the difficulties that the low-level nature of graphics programming present to standardization. I agree that there probably isn't necessarily an easy solution to this which doesn't unnecessarily restrict the space of possibilities in the name of performance or interoperability.
Have you tried it on your mobile? The fact you can experience this kind of content in the mobile browser and even mobile Facebook and Twitter clients without having to visit an app store is new and IMHO, very exciting.
I think it was Cooper who compared this kind of achievements to dancing bear. Yes, the fact that bear is dancing is amusing, but in no way that negates the fact that that's still very lame dance.
Think 3D content with minimal deployment issues* across a huge variety of devices, and suddenly it becomes a bit clearer.
The trick with the web is not the actual tech inside, as much as the instant delivery capability across a huge variety of devices which support the tech.
* Yes, yes, I know that there are tons of compatibility issues, but native support across the same range of devices is 10x harder. If not 100x or 1000x.
The purpose of this visualization is to present a car, which requires a good single model viewer. If this was a link to a more visually appealing .exe game, many of us wouldn't be able to run it, because it would require a specific platform, many would be afraid to run it, and many wouldn't bother to download and install executable just to see a car.
One difference: I was casually browsing web pages on my phone, saw the link, and was able to try out the demo after 15 seconds of loading. Then when I was done I closed the tab and that's the end of it. Nothing to install or uninstall, near-instant casual 3D interactivity (at least on a modern cell phone). I'd say that part is pretty cool.
This is one of the most impressive bits of WebGL work I've seen recently - https://ga.me/games/polycraft - a full, playable, and actually very fun cel-shaded game that shows off what WebGL is capable of very nicely.
Its neat because its a desirable car I guess and because its WebGL, but right now you can download Unity3D, build whatever, and push it out into WebGL trivially. This seems a year too late to be impressive. I think a lot of the people impressed by this haven't been keeping up with WebGL. If you want your mind blown you should see this game that runs in WebGL:
