Three.js is great, but sometimes the performance isn't quite there for large sets of data. When I made this 3D Facebook connection plotter:
http://petercottle.com/friendMapper2/
I had to switch to barebones WebGL with GPU picking to get the right performance. It would be interesting if someone made a pure data-vis library for WebGL. Like d3.js + a webgl plotter
The 3D Globe WebGL library created by google is an awesome example of data visualization. With the blessing of the reddit folks, I populated some Google Analytics data into it.
http://www.webgl.com/2012/03/webgl-globe-visualization-reddi...
Another aspect that makes WebGL projects like this even more useful is that you can right-click and save what you are currently seeing as an image.
I love that as well.
Re:WebGL Grand Theft Auto
by TazeTSchnitzel on Wednesday May 02, 2012 @02:13PM
(#3920398)
Do all browsers support that?
You made me curious, so I tried it. I could only get the option in Firefox, of which I'm running Aurora. IE, Safari, and Opera wouldn't load WebGL, I'm just running whatever the current mainstream version happens to be. Chrome, again current mainstream version, loads the WebGL but no save image option.
I've noticed that a lot of the demos people have created so far are rendering a simple scene, or trying to build a game engine. I'm looking forward to more people building user interfaces that make use of 3D for data visualization and user interaction. 3D has literally never been so accessible.
[1] https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/