WebGL with GWT/Elemental, Going 3D

In a previous post we described how to setup a first program to use WebGL with GWT's Elemental,
library, now we will elaborate our code introducing some basic 3-D graphics.

The bad: WebGL has not support for 3D graphics.  "WebGL is a 2D library" (http://games.greggman.com/game/webgl-fundamentals/).

The good: we can provide projections operators to the graphics library and let the vertex shader(s) apply them to the data and we can, quite easily, provide a fragment shader that, using eventually values computed vertex-per-vertex by the vertex shader, will do some basic shading and lighting on  3-D objects.

GWT Augmented Reality - HOWTO - step 1

Welcome to the second step of using NyARToolkit in a GWT project.

NOTE:
At the end of the previous step we used the super-source tag; someone may have noticed that when you use super-source you end up with an eclipse project with errors: the project compiles with GWT and works without problems but eclipse signals errors in all the super-source'd classes (actually because package names are not correct).
To find the best solution for this annoying situation, last week I asked on the  google-web-toolkit google group. Actually the full solution is harder than we can afford in this post but you can find here the thread; in our demo-project without serverside component and without tests the first response in the thread is enough, but for a bigger application some care is needed.

the demo app

WebGL tinysample

 Tiny WebGL/Elemental sample

1. Donwload latest GWT  (here) and setup a new project.
    
2. Add to the build path gwt-elemental.jar (is in the unpacked gwt 2.5 archive).
    
3. Add to the gwt.xml file the line  <inherits name='elemental.Elemental'/>.
    
4. Use TestWGLdrawrectangles.java as EntryPoint.
    
5. Compile and enjoy.

WebGL/GWT Fundamentals/Elemental, tiny update, texture loading works on firefox

Just after the publication of our  first post on Elemental and WebGL  (here) we found that the first two  examples we wrote for the post were running on firefox but not the remaining three.
The sample that uses a video as background image requires WebRTC so it is not a surprise, but
the sample that just loads an image and draws it in a canvas and the one with a small rotating cube were supposed to be 'portable'.

GWT Augmented Reality - HOWTO - step 0

This post is the first of a short (we hope) series describing the steps required to use NyARToolkit in a GWT/Elemental project.

The sample is at http://www.jooink.com/experiments/ARtest1/ (use chrome !!)

Augmented Reality using WebRTC, NyARToolkit, GWT, Elemental, WebGL --- Test 0

What an intense coding day today but finally we had the first working-test :)

               

[Demo HERE, use latest chrome]

Only GWT 2.5/Elemental, no plugins are required. 

Based on NyArToolkit, using WebGL for 3D rendering and WebRTC to access the camera this shows why GWT is a booster :). 
Thanks Google !!

WebGL/GWT Fundamentals/Elemental

A couple of weeks ago we started experimenting with the new "to the metal" library of GWT 2.5 (https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/articles/elemental) and, being computer graphics enthusiasts, we targeted WebGL as our main focus.

Learning deeply WebGL (WebGL - OpenGL ES 2.0 for the Web) was unfortunately a too time-consuming task four our purposse, so we decided to start translating some basic examples from javascript to GWT/elemental, just to understand how far Elemental will bring us.