Web demo goodies – August 2011

For this month’s roundup of things moving and shaking on the web, we’ll dip into the pool as well as reunite with our good old friend; the Cornell Box.

Above: Evan Wallace has once again created a much talked about tech-demo called, with great efficiency: WebGL Water. The tech demo features raytracing, soft shadows, caustics and “analytic” (meaning “fake” :) ambient occlusion. It all comes together in an interactive WebGL app that looks good and has a very decent framerate, even on middle-of-the-road hardware. Well done!

Above: Another piece from Evan Wallace, this time taking on path tracing to create more realistic lighting and shadowing in a scene. The tech-demo allows you to change the material, move the lights and add/remove objects in the scene, as well as moving them around. Fun to play with, and again, surprisingly fast.

Above: MKVDB has made a WebGL port of his native Windows 1k executable “Nautilus” intro. Goes fullscreen and is a little heavy for most mid-range computers, but if you have a fast one it looks really gorgeous.

Above: The famous Cadillac Ranch art installation in Texas has found a home online in the virtual Cadillac Ranch. You can move around (granted, the controls are not exactly top notch) and spray-paint the car-wrecks in the sand. Built on WebGL.

For this month’s roundup of things moving and shaking on the web, we’ll dip into the pool as well as reunite with our good old friend; the Cornell Box. Above:...