From 1996 to 2013 I implemented lots and lots of 3D animated stuff in the Java programming language, which I made freely available to the world as Java applets. I implemented my own modeler and real-time software renderer and everything. It was really cool.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately Oracle ended all that in mid-2013 when they changed things so that Java applets would be much more difficult for people to access. Sigh.<\/p>\n
So starting in July 2013 I retooled and started implementing things in Javascript. That was wonderful because WebGL gave me the opportunity to implement my own hardware shaders, so I could do much more interesting things with real-time rendering (and also teach my students how to implement their own hardware shaders).<\/p>\n
Unfortunately that transition left a very large back-catalog of my Java applets stranded. For most of them, I didn’t have the time or inclination to put in the many hours it would take to properly translate from one computer language to a very different one, although I did translate a few of them.<\/p>\n
So now it’s 2020, and our lab is starting to transition over to creating VR worlds with the C++ programming language, because that’s the computer language you use with the Unreal game engine. And the Unreal game engine is an awesome software platform for making stuff in VR.<\/p>\n
So I now find myself skipping entirely over the seven years of Javascript, and handing some of my old Java applets to grad students to translate into C++, so we can use them in VR. It’s an odd sort of leapfrogging, but I guess that’s the way things go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From 1996 to 2013 I implemented lots and lots of 3D animated stuff in the Java programming language, which I made freely available to the world as Java applets. I implemented my own modeler and real-time software renderer and everything. It was really cool. Unfortunately Oracle ended all that in mid-2013 when they changed things … Continue reading “Leapfrogging”<\/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\/22254"}],"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=22254"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22255,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22254\/revisions\/22255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}