From WebGL Camp

This was the schedule for the talks at WebGL Camp #1 which took place at Stanford Univerity on Friday June 25, 2010. Videos from all talks and slides from some are available below

9:00 - 9:15	Intro, Henrik Bennetsen
9:15 - 9:45	Peterson Trethewey, O3D (video)
9:45 - 10:15	Paul Brunt, GLGE (video)
10:15 - 10:30	Break
10:30 - 11:00	Mark Barnes, COLLADA (video) (slides)
11:00 - 11:30	Giles Thomas, Learning WebGL (video) (slides)
11:30 - 12:00	Daniel Horn, Sirikata (video)
12:00 - 1:00	Lunch
1:00 - 1:30	Daniel B. Miller, Katalabs (video)
1:30 - 2:00	Trevor Smith, Spaciblō (video)
2:00 - 2:30	Ewen Cheslack-Postava, Stanford Computer Science (video) (slides)
2:30 - 3:00	Break
3:00 - 3:30	Vladimir Vukicevic, Mozilla Firefox (video)
3:30 - 4:00	Alan Chaney, Mechnicality (video) (slides)
4:00 - 4:30	Google Chrome 3D Team (video) (slides)
4:30 - 4:45	Wrap up, Henrik Bennetsen

Speaker bios and talk abstracts

Peterson Trethewey, O3D

After finishing his PhD in mathematics, Peterson took a step sideways in his career to the field of software engineering. He has now been working at Google on Chrome and 3D graphics for two years. He is currently working on the WebGL implementation of O3D.

This talk will introduce the O3D API, show some demos of what it can do, and show how to get started putting 3D content into webpage.

Paul Brunt, GLGE

Paul is a full time web developer and primary developer on the GLGE project. Has a keen interest in all things web and is very excited to see where the web is going.

The presentation will focus on the key features and benefits of GLGE, detailing some of the webgl abstractions which GLGE introduces as well as demoing some of the many effects GLGE can produce.

Mark Barnes, COLLADA

Mark Barnes is a Sr Software Architect at Biodroid Productions Lda. and a Sr Technical Consultant at Expert Support Inc.. He was previously a Graphics Architect at Intel Corporation, and a Staff Software Engineer and the COLLADA Project Lead at Sony Computer Entertainment US R&D. Mark is the chairman for the COLLADA working group and the principal designer and specification editor of COLLADA. Mark is a coauthor of the book COLLADA: Sailing the Gulf of 3D Digital Content Creation and has given presentations about COLLADA design and features at Siggraph, Eurographics, GDC, Imagina, and IGDA since 2004.

The talk will focus on the importance and value of content and how to achieve it with COLLADA.

Giles Thomas, Learning WebGL

Giles Thomas has been working in the software industry since 1995, and after a range of jobs ranging from writing tools for programmers to building trading floor applications for an investment bank, in 2005 he co-founded a company called Resolver Systems to build a spreadsheet-like software development environment in Python. Exiled from enjoyable coding to the wilds of management and marketing, he started spending his free time playing with this new-fangled WebGL thing, and is having the time of his life creating lessons and linking to other people's cool demos at http://learningwebgl.com/.

Giles' talk, "First steps toward a FAQ for the WebGL community" will give examples of the questions he's encountered most from WebGL newbies, with his own suggested answers, which he fully expects to have to completely changed by the end of the session.

Daniel Horn, Sirikata

Daniel Horn is a graphics and networking PhD candidate at Stanford, having spent two years researching virtual world scalability and architecture. Daniel is the lead architect of the Sirikata virtual world platform (http://www.sirikata.com). Sirikata's goal is applying our virtual world architecture knowledge in practice. No state-of-the-art open source virtual world systems with corporate-friendly licenses exist, so building this BSD-licensed platform with Katalabs will enable improved telepresence, communication and interaction for companies, educators, and scientists.

WebGL provides an excellent standard for a single user 3d experience. However, little effort has been put into developing multiuser WebGL apps. A few proof of concepts exist using XMLHttpRequest. This talk will discuss leveraging WebSockets, google protocol buffers and a inter-web-worker communication API to drive a graphics system in a multiuser WebGL environment. This talk discusses the challenges of connecting to the Sirikata space server developed at Stanford from WebGL and how we are addressing them.

Daniel B. Miller, Katalabs

Daniel B. Miller has led a varied career as a musician, computer scientist, and serial entrepreneur. After founding On2 Technologies (developers of VP8/webm video codec, recently acquired by Google), he worked on digital physics and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University and for robotics startup Anybots. He has contributed to open source projects including Theora, Opensim. and Sirikata. Recently he co-founded Katalabs, where he serves as President.

The talk will focus on how WebGL is poised to transform research in multiple areas, by enabling low-friction sharing of interactive 3D visualizations

Trevor Smith, Spaciblō

Trevor F. Smith is a freelance engineer specializing in unusual uses for the web. He has been a browser engineer at Be, a research engineer at Xerox PARC, and during the boom he was a server engineer for a large social site, i-drive. When not working on his open stack for 3D social spaces he is working with his clients to turn napkin sketches into shipping products:.

WebGL is only the beginning. Rich 3D spaces on the web won't become commonplace until we build integrated toolkits for the entire stack, from artist tools to developer libraries to production servers. In this talk I will present one example of such a stack, Spaciblō, and then lead a discussion about how to make others.

Ewen Cheslack-Postava, Stanford Computer Science

Ewen Cheslack-Postava is a PhD candidate in the Stanford Computer Science Department. His research focuses on the challenges in building scalable, federated, and user-extensible virtual world systems. His current work is on efficient and scalable services for communication and spatial queries in virtual worlds. In the past he dabbled in high quality, interactive rendering techniques, taking traditionally offline techniques and making them run in real-time.

WebGL provides a proven and fast API for 3D graphics on the Web. But JavaScript is still slow compared to programming languages traditionally used for games. This talk will discuss how we can leverage another emerging standard, Web Workers, by providing an asynchronous API for graphics and distributing the majority of logic (scripts, physics, networking, etc) to worker threads. Web developers are particularly well-suited to use this new API because they are already used to thinking asynchronously: the web is one big distributed system. Both the benefits, such as isolation of graphics and game performance and natural extensions for multi-agent systems, and challenges, such as state management and replication, will be discussed.

Vladimir Vukicevic, Mozilla Firefox

Vladimir Vukicevic is a Principal Engineer at Mozilla, and focuses on improving the web platform for both users and developers. He's been involved with WebGL (originally "Canvas 3D") since it's creation, and is working to deliver both WebGL and other capabilities to developers so that they can create the next generation of web applications.

Topic: The "Web" in WebGL

Alan Chaney, Mechnicality

Alan Chaney is the founder and CTO of Los Angeles-based startup Mechnicality, Inc. Alan has been involved in all kinds of technologies, from electron microscopes to television transmitters to 3D graphics. He developed a 3D facial animation system, was part of a team that invented a shadow browsing system for video, and was the CTO of Muzlink.com, a music aggregation site. He recently joined the COLLADA Working Group to help define "COLLADA in the cloud."

In this presentation, Alan will look at ways to exploit the exciting opportunities WebGL and other HTML5 standards offer. He will:

• Discuss how WebGL can be used to develop entirely new types of applications combining Web services with AJAX and 3D-enabled browsers
• Compare design patterns for WebGL applications with those commonly used in OpenGL desktop systems
• Examine how to optimize client-server interactions to get the best out of WebGL.

Google Chrome 3D Team

Vangelis Kokkevis is a software engineer at Google working on graphics support for the Chrome browser. He is the Tech Lead for the O3D project and is currently involved with the design of the WebGL API and the implementation of a GPU-accelerated rendering path for Chrome.

Ken Russell is a software engineer at Google working on support for WebGL and related 3D graphics technologies in the Chrome browser.

We will present unique features of Chromium's WebGL implementation, including the ANGLE project; the sandboxed, multi-process browser architecture; integration with GPU-accelerated compositing; and performance optimizations.