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SFX CS590, WebGL, and Shaders

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Note: this is just a quick overview of the SFX UNM CS590 course.  More in depth later!

Just finished a nifty experimental educational stunt at the Santa Fe Complex (SFX): taking the UNM CS590 course taught by Ed Angel .. but given in Santa Fe at SFX to a group of folks interested in a wide variety of topics, from GPU programming to game programming to high performance parallel computation to ambient computing combining projectors and cameras to do computing in your spatial environment .. your whiteboards, rooms and domes.

Ed had just finished a major rewrite of his textbook to be Shader based.  Shaders are programs running in your computer’s GPU chip with very fast matrix manipulations of huge number of vertices.  Not only were shaders a new addition to CS590, but OpenGL itself had morphed considerably .. including not only the desktop C/C++ version, but also GLES, the Embedded Systems (phones and tablets, mainly) but the HTML5 WebGL variant.  Within the class we had all versions being used.

I chose to use WebGL, mainly using Google Chrome, WebKit (Safari’s developer build), and Firefox .. all of which have most of HTML5 implemented.  The documentation was pretty raw but fortunately the Learning WebGL site is extraordinarily useful.

We had three fascinating homework assignments, plus a final project if taking the course for graduate school credits:

I kept stumbling over unsuspected surprises while doing these:

  • Javascript: Holy cow, its Lisp without parens!  Closures etc.  Start with Crockford and Good/Bad/Ugly.
  • Self Documenting: Wow, WebGL is in a web page, I can do my write-up next to the 3D model!
  • HTML5: Not just 2D/3D Canvases but way way more!
  • GPU Programming: Thinking about 100′s of processors so dumb they can’t share data!
  • Interpreter: Because JS and all its libraries are just text, you can read the code and libraries easily.

That’s all for now, just wanted to finally get this stuff posted.  All the source can be gotten from the CS591 directory.  The zip files make downloads easy as well.


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