Session 5A: WebGL

One nice library for WebGL is Stackgl: http://stack.gl/ Not a library, more like a collection of modules to compose together http://stack.gl/packages/ StackGL is not a good entry point to learning WebGL excepts for the live coding tool to learn shaders.

Three.js is a better abstraction, because plain WebGL is ugly and low-level, and has a nice set of examples http://threejs.org/examples/

WebGL is a technology to program on the GPU. The advantages are that GPU can process things in parallel and it has a direct access to the graphics display.

Shaders are one of the features to describe functions that decides the values of each pixels in parallel. Here's a book on shaders http://patriciogonzalezvivo.com/2015/thebookofshaders/

Pixi.js is a very simple and powerful multi-target renderer for WebGL with a canvas fallback http://www.pixijs.com/

Processing (the Java version) has a very simple API for building quick 3D graphics on OpenGL https://processing.org/ it can also be compiled for Android. The community is working on a rewrite of the js version called p5.js http://p5js.org/ that will have the 3D API too at some point. So learning Processing could be a good investment.

Mapbox.gl is a very nice map framework using WebGL for tiles and features. https://www.mapbox.com/blog/mapbox-gl/

Superconductor is an awesome library using WebCL for general computing on GPU http://superconductor.github.io/superconductor/ But WebCL doesn't work in the browser yet.

about:tracing for profiling in the browser