1. 3D on the Web in 2011 Chad Austin Technical Director, IMVU

2. Who is Chad? Iowa State, 2005 M.S. Human Computer Interaction Renaissance, a functional shading language IMVU, 2005-Present

3. What is IMVU? Mass market 3D World’s largest virtual catalog: 6 million items 7000 new items every day 50 million registered users 50,000 of which created content in last month Downloadable client...

4. IMVU likes 3D, so what? Tasteful, responsive UI Transitions 60 Hz animation GPGPU Harness local processing power from web pages

5. Today’s Agenda GPUs WebGL Flash 11 Unity3D Silverlight 5 Native Client Trends and Unsolved Problems

6. Caveat New and changing Can you teach me?

7. GPU

8. Graphics Processors Vector math accelerators external to CPU Often with separate memory ~Every computer has a GPU in some form Limited API access Direct3D & OpenGL Starting to see OpenCL, CUDA, DirectCompute… Wildly different internal architectures

9. History of Consumer 3D <1999: OpenGL, Direct3D, niche APIs 2000: Direct3D 7 – “fixed function”, multitexturing 2001:Direct3D 8 – limited programmability 2003: Direct3D 9 – general programmability 2011: finally on the web!

10. Modern GPUs Buffers of data… textures, vertex arrays … and code that runs on them Vertex shaders, pixel shaders

11. Modern GPUs (con’t)

12. Shaders Small programs: Input: Vertex attributes Textures Output: Pixels on screen Syntax varies across platforms But same basic functionality

13. Today’s Market Unity hardware survey Steam hardware survey IMVU experiences

14. Today’s Market (con’t) shader model 2.0! 8 textures 8 vec4f vertex attributes (wish it were 16…) decent number of shader instructions

15. What’s missing? Vertex texture fetch Geometry shaders Gamma?

16. Survey

17. WebGL

18. WebGL JavaScript access to OpenGL ES 2.0 Fully programmable Composites into HTML on page

19. WebGL Demos http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/worlds_of_webgl/ http://o3d.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples_webgl/o3d-webgl-samples/pool.html http://www.ro.me/

20. WebGL, con’t Uses ANGLE on Windows Hardware and driver blacklist

21. WebGL Unsolved Problems No Safari (yet) No iOS(yet) Device ubiquity? Example: GMA 950 Content storage Fullscreen Input handling

22. Flash 11

23. Flash 11 Stage3D Exposes GPU capabilities to ActionScript Custom shader language: AGAL

24. AGAL example http://pixelante.com/index.php?b=ambient_and_color_lighting_molehill_agal_flash_tutorial

25. Flash 11 Demos http://alternativaplatform.com/en/demos/maxracer/ http://molehill.zombietycoon.com/

26. Flash 11, con’t Expect widespread deployment Automatic software fallback Driver blacklist GPU not capable of shaders Windowless?

27. Flash 11 Downsides ActionScript Low shader limits 8 vertex attributes 8 temporaries no vertex texture fetch Mobile...?

28. Unity3D

29. Unity3D Web plugin, iOS, Wii, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 Custom graphics engine Built-in visual effects Scene graph Art pipeline Built-in asset store Runs on older hardware if necessary

30. Unity3D demo http://unity3d.com/gallery/live-demos/tropical-paradise

31. Unity3D downsides No windowless mode Commercial software No Linux Requires plug-in (10% installed, 70% install rate) Does not fully expose hardware

32. Silverlight

33. Silverlight 5 Integration with XNA 4 Limited to “Reach” profile, shader model 2.0 Demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDIeijJkV14

34. Native Client

35. Native Client Google’s in-browser, secure native code engine Available in Chrome today Write programs in C++, run them on the web Exposes OpenGL ES 2.0 if supported Remember ANGLE?

36. Native Client Downsides No cross-browser plans Teething pains

37. Trends & Open Questions

38. Betting time! Short-term: Flash 11 Long-term: WebGL

39. Security 3D drivers suck Rarely updated Crashes Security problems 3D on the web exposes all of the above Driver blacklists Important: this is a solvable problem

40. Trends 3D is here to stay I expect a killer app Very Soon Now

41. Thank you! Questions? chad@imvu.com @chadaustin http://engineering.imvu.com We’re hiring! http://www.imvu.com/jobs