Looking Outwards #3
Snow Stack is a demo built to highlight Webkit’s 3d CSS effects. It was created using only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s pretty amazing that this is being rendered in a browser, but since it only runs in Safari currently, it might not take off just yet. Nonetheless, it’s quite impressive.
The images are loaded in from Flickr, so clicking on an image will take you to Flickr.
Arrow keys move around and spacebar zooms in.
It only runs in Safari on Snow Leopard unless you have the latest build of Webkit.
http://www.satine.org/research/webkit/snowleopard/snowstack.html
It looks a lot like this: http://www.cooliris.com/
which seems to have more browser support and works for anything from google images to facebook photos.
However, a download is required, I believe, and I wouldn’t be surprised if cooliris consumed more resources.
This is actually based on an example that comes with Quartz Composer (which also runs in the browser on Macs.) I’m really excited that graphics-accelerated programming is finally making its way into the browser. Soon we will be able to use this on the iPhone which is pretty cool.
There’s an alternative technology that Google has been showing off called O3D. They have an amazing demo using a 3D-accelerated scene graph api that’s worth checking out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uofWfXOzX-g
Both of these technologies are working toward a standard. There is some worry that WebGL will have problems because the render loop is implemented completely in Javascript whereas O3D is a C++ plugin. Javascript has been getting faster and faster so I don’t know if this will be an issue. WebKit and Firefox are both going the WebGL route.