[X3D-Public] Fw: Body Browser WebGL app

[Joe D Williams]

"public webgl" <public_webgl at khronos.org>
Sent: Monday, December 20, 2010 3:19 PM
Subject: Re: [Public WebGL] Body Browser WebGL app


>
> On Dec 17, 2010, at 12:02 PM, Vangelis Kokkevis 
> <vangelis at google.com> wrote:
>
>> If I may, I'd like to drop in a plug for a new WebGL app that we 
>> launched yesterday on Google Labs, coinciding with the first Chrome 
>> Beta release that has WebGL enabled by default.
>>
>> The app is called "Body Browser" and allows users to navigate a 
>> highly detailed 3D model of the human anatomy, search for 
>> anatomical entities, click and query about organs, bones, nerves, 
>> etc.
>>
>> The direct link is:
>>
>> http:\\bodybrowser.googlelabs.com
>>
>> and of course requires a WebGL enabled browser!  Seems to work 
>> equally well on FF4 Beta, Safari nightly and of course Chrome!
>>
>> Some interesting stats:
>> 1. The app has no trouble pushing upwards of 1.5M triangles at 
>> 60fps even on common laptop GPUs.
>> 2. Geometry transfers from the server were compressed down to about 
>> 6 bytes per vertex (including position, normals and texture 
>> coords).  Decompression happens on the client side. Hopefully we'll 
>> have a writeup on the techniques used soon.
>>
>> I find it to be yet another great example of how far all the WebGL 
>> spec and implementations have come and how close we are to creating 
>> a compelling cross-platform 3D API for browser that actually works 
>> as advertised!
>
> This is great work. And being involved in VRML 15 years ago, our 
> holy grail was getting something of this quality viewable in all 
> browsers. Even X3D has not achieved this feat to date. But this demo 
> runs on 7 browser/platform combos to date. And WebGL is less than 2 
> years old!
>
> The future is bright for us all!
>
> -----
> ~Chris
> cmarrin at apple.com
>
>