Dissecting WebGL with Google Creative Technologist Justin Windle

WebGL is a magical graphics leprechaun that lives inside good web browsers. It’s the permissible spawn of OpenGL, which is a big unicorn that eats code and shits pixels.

Taming WebGL will allow you to create GPU accelerated graphics, physics and image effects that can run on desktop and mobile browsers without any plugins. Nice.

This little leprechaun speaks an ancient language though, generally forgotten in Frontendland and despite it’s computational and rendering dexterity, it’s quite shy and will often appear obtuse and quite frankly very unforthcoming about why it’s being such a disobedient little shit.

Join Huge (http://www.hugeinc.com) and Justin Windle (https://twitter.com/soulwire) as we ply this volatile gremlin with treats and make it dance for us. We’ll learn what he really is, what he’s good for, dissect his digestive system (aka the pipeline) and ruminate how to listen to his faintly mumbled complaints. Then, whilst grasping the whip of compliance, we’ll command him to draw shapes, process images, render 3D objects and create particle effects at staggering speeds.

About Justin Windle

I was supposed to be illustrating a graphic novel but got a little distracted by code. Still writing code, trying to finish the graphic novel; really each page now is just a visual experiment with code and another toe dipped in the murky shoreline spume of web tech.

I work at the Google Creative Lab, where I do unspeakable things. By which I mean I’m contractually obliged not to talk about them, not that they’re bad. I got there by way of some “top digital agencies” and “startups” - these are colonies of generally intelligent people who sell their knowledge and skills in exchange for money and scraps of nerdily fame, with the goal of making some kind of questionable gubbins seem appealing to human beings - at least for long enough for them to trade some other commodity for it. After this their own shame and guilt will take over and they’ll convince themselves it’s great all by themselves to avoid personal embarrassment.

My goal is to become less crap at making fun and beautiful things and avoid unnecessary fines.