I’ve been playing around with WebGL. To many people reading this, the word “WebGL” might not mean very much. But to some it is a very big deal.<\/p>\n
You see, computers have been getting faster at an exponential rate, a phenomenon commonly known as “Moore’s Law”. So computations which were out of reach only a few years ago, because they were just too gosh darned slow, one day become easy, and then soon after that you can do them in real time.<\/p>\n
The general purpose processor on your computer can do a lot of different things, but that very generality means it can only go so fast. It’s not allowed to cut corners, because it has to be general.<\/p>\n
But those little graphics processor chips that also come with your computer have no such responsibility. They don’t need to run an operating system, or a file system, or support your text editor or spreadsheet. All they need to do is make graphics happen blazingly fast. And that means they can indeed cut corners. As a result, they can do certain calculations hundreds of times faster than your computer’s main processor.<\/p>\n
WebGL is a standard that lets you access all that raw power directly from your Web browser. It’s not yet supported by all Web browsers, but it will be.<\/p>\n
Which means that I and others who make cool graphics things can, right in your Web browser, show you — and let you play with — stuff that is far cooler and more intricate than anything you’ve ever seen before.<\/p>\n
I’m going to start posting examples of this stuff soon, as soon as I make something I’m really happy with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been playing around with WebGL. To many people reading this, the word “WebGL” might not mean very much. But to some it is a very big deal. You see, computers have been getting faster at an exponential rate, a phenomenon commonly known as “Moore’s Law”. So computations which were out of reach only a … Continue reading “Much faster”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12815"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12815"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12816,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12815\/revisions\/12816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}