Here are some resources on WebGL, the OpenGL implementation that now runs in current Firefox and Chrome browsers.
- There’s a WebGL specification, and as usual, its intended for implementors of the spec, not for users of the API. Though at least this spec as actual usage examples, so if you’re looking for a specific detail, this could be a good last resort.
- An okay Getting Started tutorial let’s you render, BEHOLD, a square. It makes use of vertex and fragment shaders, making the whole thing fairly complicated, but hey, its hardware accelerated and you’ll learn a lot of the low level basics.
- A lot more resources can be found on Planet WebGL, there I just found this cool X-Wing demo.
- Another site decicated to learning WebGL, The WebGL Cookbook.
And with that, a jump to WebGL libraries or “3d engines”, on various high or low levels:
- GLGE claims to be “WebGL for the lazy”
- CopperLicht is just a “JavaScript 3D Engine”
- three.js isn’t focussed soley on WebGL, as it can also output to canvas and svg; it has a focus on being “for dummies”, so might be the best starting point
- lightgl.js is yet another approach, being more low-level (without a scene graph! whatever that means).
Related to the above three.js is probably, in some way, ThreeNodes.js, which is kind of an IDE for WebGL.
One of these days I hope to convert my old 3D models to some format that I can load into one of these engines and bring them to your browser…