Designing a 3D widget library for WebGL enabled browsers

Abstract

Emerging web technologies such as HTML5 and WebGL have rapidly altered the landscape of web application development. Indeed, it is increasingly feasible to develop interactive applications with web technologies only, with no vendor-specific plugins that require separate installation. Moreover, following the generic trend towards 3D systems, it is also becoming increasingly feasible to create 3D content inside the web. However, many of the available options build on low-level facilities, which, while well-suited for demos, complicate the development of true applications. In this paper, we aim at simplifying the development of 3D web applications by designing a 3D widget library that uses WebGL as its rendering engine, and give a sample application that uses the facilities of the library. In addition, we list lessons learned from the design and implementation process.

Lively3D: Building a 3D Desktop Environment as a Single Page Application

“…To evaluate the design, using WebWidget3D and its predefined widgets we were able to reduce the amount of JavaScript code lines by 26% [3]. In addition, using the library liberates developers to focus on solving application specific problems by allowing them to overlook numerous details that remain similar in different applications.…”

“…Motivated by the above observations we created WebWidget3D, a 3D widget library for WebGL [3]. The idea of the library is to provide some predefined reusable 3D widgets and tools for building custom 3D widgets.…”