Just when you’ve seen everything…
I was consuming my morning coffee, and going through my usual routine:
- drink coffee
- make notes on what I’m doing today on the AIR: Steampunk site
- drink more coffee (as once is never enough)
- review my throw away project made from the GLGE library (from glge.org naturally!) to figure out how to make a lovely scene with drifting fog.
- drink more coffee
… then I came across an article that made me forget my coffee completely (as you might guess, that takes a lot… I like my coffee). Namely this (view link using Chrome or firefox):
http://www.andrew-hoyer.com/experiments/cloth
That … that is amazing.
I’m very used to Javascript / HTML / CSS being used to manipulate the page in many wild ways. I’ve spent many a year building Javascript based database engines, so I know it can do some fairly hairy stuff.
However, this opens up new worlds. It does make me wonder, at what point does the browser become the new operating system? Or is the browser the new GUI for the OS kernals and we’ve just not quite hit that tipping point where they suddenly mash together? Or have we?
ahem … Google’s Chrome OS …
In that world, it would seem games would be scripted in the browser (iron-clas security packets wrapped around it of course), and from there distributed into any platform that can run aforementioned browser… like a netbook, a PC, a Mac, a console, the ipad, the iphone, the droid, and the list rolls way way on.
I honestly don’t know. Seems that world might be creeping up on us.
Should be fun I think.
Now where did I put my coffee?
Wow, that’s an impressive demo.
I do know that browsers based on WebKit are adding WebGL, which is essentially OpenGL for web browsers. I don’t know what this will mean for Flash but it will definitely get interesting.
Great post!
March 5th, 2010 at 7:31 amthat is indeed awesome.
March 8th, 2010 at 4:35 pmThanks! It will be very interesting to see how this impacts Flash. Currently the list of browsers absorbing WebKit is a large one, even IE9 (leaked by one of the developers) will be a full adopter of Canvas … which will launch it towards compliance of such tech like that demo.
March 21st, 2010 at 12:22 pmGreat post
Another interesting thing is Chrome having Unity’s webplayer plug-in integrated natively now. Been playing around with the idea of a simple 3d CMS using unity3d for the “template”/front-end and a basic php backend with a mysql database closing the gap between the two. Could be fun.
September 6th, 2010 at 5:18 pm@halfgrin:
Awesome idea. If you wanted to go lightweight on the backend, you might could try sqlite instead of MySql. Or try something like Persevere which would let you have Javascript running on your backend, if you’re feeling adventurous.
September 15th, 2010 at 7:27 am