Ajaxlife 3d - maybe with javascript ? :-)

Now, after all these touchy posts, something bit more geeky.

When I first heard about AjaxLife, I thought "hmm. got to be a phishing". Well, it did sound too good to be true. (And looking at the picture, it seemed like a full-blown 3D-rendered landscape, which according to my knowledge was impossible. And still is :-)

So, I'd like to use this post to publicly apologize to Katharine for my scepticism, as I mistook a static picture for a dynamically rendered one :) I tried the ajaxlife since, and indeed it works great, very nifty.

However, I'm still haunted by that "3D in the browser" thing, and today googled for a few interesting items - some of them might be well-known to you, some are not - they're not a bloody-edge, but do provide some food for thought.


The demo of the <canvas> tag, which is almost a classic now. The textured version gives around 3-5fps on my laptop with the "high res textures". Which is almost comparable to SL performance that I get (although indeed with much more graphics in it)

realtime 3D rendering demo - a very neat hack with using the <div> elements to create right triangles, some math to render arbitrary triangles by a reduced number of divs. well, and once you can render any 2d triangle of an arbitrary color.. all the rest is a boring mechanics :)

Full-functional raytracer entirely in javascript Useless for dynamic graphics, a total CPU hog (and I don't want to see the DOM that the image of 128x128 creates :), but maybe useful for experiments with in-browser rendering of sculpties, if coupled with pnglets for saving the resulting works ?

Since I obviously definitely will not ever have time to mess around with it - just coining the idea in the hope that someone with enough time and passion for SL might look at this - representing at least the relative positions of avatars in 3D in the browser might be quite a fun.

(And in case there are any teachers out there - I'd think it might make a good topic for a project in a coming school year - a mix of 3D rendering, some HTML, Javascript coding, and server-side coding looks like quite a fun of a task to me).