“An Interactive Introduction to WebGL” by Angel and Shreiner

For more than 15 years OpenGL and its derivatives have been the most widely used APIs for creating interactive computer graphics applications across all major platforms. Their uses span virtually all application areas and reveal the most up-to-date features of modern graphics hardware.

Over the past four years there has been extraordinary interest in WebGL, the JavaScript implementation of OpenGL ES 2.0. Applications developed using the WebGL run in all major browsers. Programs can be hosted remotely, downloaded using a URL, and run locally, and still take advantage of all a system’s local resources, in particular its GPU. In addition, applications can be integrated with other Web content and libraries. Higher level APIs such as three.js have been built on top of WebGL.

This course provides an accelerated introduction to WebGL. Our goal is to present participants with the capabilities of the API and help them navigate the plethora of available APIs. We will present simple coding examples using WebGL. Although we do not expect participants will know all the functionality of the API after a few hours of the course, we expect that they will leave knowing its capabilities and how to start on the path of creating their own applications.