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I am perplexed. Modern games are fantastically more visually appealing and contentwise impressive than this. Modern films utilize computer graphics that are far

by fsloth 11y ago

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.

MayorOfMonkeys 11y ago
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.
- rimantas 11y ago
  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.
- samsungguy 11y ago
  I have, and it's painfully slow, even on my Galaxy S6. A single model at 10fps is mot impressive in the least to me.
  - dan1234 11y ago
    Feels realtime on iOS (iPhone 6) and would be great as part of a 'configure your car' tool on a dealer website.
  - brandong 11y ago
    Seems to work well on my S6 using chrome. Loads in about 5 seconds and runs 20-25fps except when sitting in the car looking at the dashboard.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
oblio 11y ago
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.
arethuza 11y ago
I gave it a quick check and it works on multiple desktop browsers and on my iPhone - that's pretty impressive.
onion2k 11y ago
This is one of the most impressive bits of WebGL work I've seen recently - https://ga.me/games/polycraft 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.
mixedbit 11y ago
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.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
nicklaf 11y ago
WebGL is like the dancing bear; even if it doesn't dance very well, there is nevertheless endless fascination when it dances at all.
- fsloth 11y ago
  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.
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
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: https://ga.me/games/polycraft https://ga.me/games/polycraft
- MayorOfMonkeys 11y ago
  You can't make this in Unity. Unity doesn't support the mobile browser whereas this runs on an iPhone 4S.
guscost 11y ago
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.

by fsloth 11y ago

MayorOfMonkeys 11y ago

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.

rimantas 11y ago
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.
samsungguy 11y ago
I have, and it's painfully slow, even on my Galaxy S6. A single model at 10fps is mot impressive in the least to me.
- dan1234 11y ago
  Feels realtime on iOS (iPhone 6) and would be great as part of a 'configure your car' tool on a dealer website.
- brandong 11y ago
  Seems to work well on my S6 using chrome. Loads in about 5 seconds and runs 20-25fps except when sitting in the car looking at the dashboard.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

oblio 11y ago

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.

arethuza 11y ago

I gave it a quick check and it works on multiple desktop browsers and on my iPhone - that's pretty impressive.

onion2k 11y ago

This is one of the most impressive bits of WebGL work I've seen recently - https://ga.me/games/polycraft 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.

mixedbit 11y ago

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.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

nicklaf 11y ago

WebGL is like the dancing bear; even if it doesn't dance very well, there is nevertheless endless fascination when it dances at all.

fsloth 11y ago
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.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago

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: https://ga.me/games/polycraft https://ga.me/games/polycraft

MayorOfMonkeys 11y ago
You can't make this in Unity. Unity doesn't support the mobile browser whereas this runs on an iPhone 4S.

guscost 11y ago

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.