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A comment on WebGL Shader Toy.

Re:WebGL Shader Toy by abi on Thursday March 17, 2011 @02:34AM (#2335287)
I don't think enough people are understanding (1) how cool this is (switch to the tunnel presets and start tweaking the inputs and the shader!) and (2) how important this is for introducing/teaching people about computer science. Now, for the first time ever, we can actually teach kids how to program cool 3D graphics with just a browser (no downloads, no messing with installation issues, no platform-dependent crap).

I'm planning on teaching a class on WebGL for high schoolers at my university (for those of you who are curious, it's through this program [1]). All I have to do is get them to open Chrome/Safari, show them this page and teach them a few basic concepts about OpenGL/vertices/textures/shaders and they can start learning stuff on their own. Hacking and tweaking stuff is the most fun way to learn something. And I think this could be a major milestone for computer science education.

[1] http://www.stanfordesp.org/

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Re:WebGL Shader Toy by stevenashley on Thursday March 17, 2011 @07:40AM (#2335776)
I can vouch for this approach. When I was younger I discovered the magic of the Winamp AVS Editor. I would not be developing software today if I hadn't of discovered it.

It should be possible to perform audio analysis within the shader using the Web Audio API. Google has some demos [1] that seem to do this sort of thing though they don't seem to work for me.

These new APIs have me quite excited :)

[1] http://chromium.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/audio/index...

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Re:WebGL Shader Toy by buza on Friday March 18, 2011 @07:00PM (#2342370)
This is absolutely a wonderful project, from a very talented member of the demoscene. However, "for the first time ever" isn't entirely accurate. Web-based visual experimentation environments for 2d/3d programming have existed for years, from the Flash-based (wonderfl.net), to Java, to (many) based on processing.js. Being shader-based, I'd say this is actually less accessible to kids, unless you're just teaching them that moving sliders and changing parameters is 'programming'.
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