PlayCanvas announces Physically Based Rendering is now available via WebGL. Over the past 3 years since PlayCanvas started, WebGL adoption has skyrocketed. WebGL now supported in every major browser, both on mobile and the desktop. Current statistics show that 82.7% of web users have the ability to run WebGL content, and this number continues to rise. The PlayCanvas ‘Star-Lord Demo’ shows that WebGL is perfectly capable of implementing PBR and other high-end graphical features.

This Wikipedia visualization was created by French computer science student Owen Cornec. Each “star” in WikiGalaxy is a single article on Wikipedia. Highly related articles are placed close to each other in space with connections between them. While this is a Chrome experiment running WebGL and HTML5, WikiGalaxy should work in most modern browsers.

Urban Galaxy Online is a MMORPG built entirely on HTML5 technologies. Its graphics are powered by the WebGL renderer of the popular three.js engine. The game was built by a small team of 3 developers during the last 5 years, betting on WebGL while the standard was still shaping up and browser support was partial. Now the game is fully supported on all major desktop browsers, with experimental support for WebGL enabled mobile Chrome and mobile Safari.

Unity 5.0 beta has launched and comes with one-click WebGL deployment to compatible browsers.

The free WebGL library CopperLicht has just been released in version 1.8. New features are animation blending, directional lights, iOS 8 support, touch aware browser support, compatibility with the just released CopperCube 5 editor, and much more. CopperLicht can be downloaded for free from its website, which also includes some demos of it in action.

WebGL is getting closer to running on all browsers, with Apple adding WebGL to the recently released iOS 8. A complete list of WebGL compatible browsers is available here.

Cesium is an open-source JavaScript library for creating 3D globes and 2D maps in a web browser without a plugin. It uses WebGL for hardware-accelerated graphics and glTF for 3D models. Version 1.0 includes support for worldwide high-resolution terrain; global imagery from standards such as WMS and Bing Maps; vector data from GeoJSON and TopoJSON; and a large geometry library.

CL3VER Viewer 2.1 improves 3D visualization of CL3VER presentations in most browsers—with IE in Windows XP being shown as the odd man out. CL3VER works with both Flash and WebGL. When you try to access a CL3VER 3D scene from your browser, it recognize the browser version and provides a Flash or WebGL scene automatically.

The Khronos Toronto Chapter will be holding their next meetup on Thursday July 10 on Yonge street in Toronto at the Uken Games Office. From the meetup page “Those who’ve tried out the iOS8 update were met with something truly remarkable: WebGL is enabled by default in Mobile Safari. With Apple finally on board, we now have support from ALL major desktop and mobile browsers.” Spacing is limited, so if you are interested in attending, please signup soon!

Recent research shows that WebGL is now supported on more devices than Flash. It’s the bigger platform. In fact, WebGL powered HTML5 is now the largest platform on the planet for interactive browser graphics. Now that WebGL is available on IE and Safari as well, we should see WebGL become even bigger. Long live WebGL!

Blend4Web is a new WebGL framework for authoring and interactive rendering of three-dimensional graphics and audio in browsers. The platform is intended for creating visualizations, presentations, online-shops, games and other rich internet applications, and is integrated tightly with Blender (hence the name).

The Khronos Group today announced the ratification and public release of the WebCL 1.0 specification. Developed in close cooperation with the Web community, WebCL extends the capabilities of HTML5 browsers by enabling developers to offload computationally intensive processing to available computational resources such as multicore CPUs and GPUs. WebCL defines JavaScript bindings to OpenCL APIs that enable Web applications to compile OpenCL C kernels and manage their parallel execution. Like WebGL, WebCL is expected to enable a rich ecosystem of JavaScript middleware that provides access to accelerated functionality to a wide diversity of Web developers. Please join us March 20th for our WebCL DevU at GDC.

SketchUp 2014 has been released along with a new version of SketchUp and a completely revamped 3D Warehouse. There are quite a few enhancements to the main SketchUp product, including tweaks to the core SketchUp modeler and an updated API. For the 3D Warehouse, one of the best new features is a way to easily embed visuals of your 3D models via their new WebGL Viewer. As an example, the following embedded model should be fully 3D for most of you.

MontageJS has introduced a new WebGL-based component for the MontageJS framework. The 3D view component for MontageJS offers an abstraction layer for WebGL and aims to make the individual elements of a 3D scene just as easy to manipulate as conventional HTML elements in the page DOM. If your browser has WebGL enabled, you can try out a demo here. The MontageJS 3D view component is designed to load and display glTF content. The COLLADA working group provides Mac and Windows open source converters to translate COLLADA files into glTF.