![]() That’s a racing game, right? Step 1: Prepare a Vector Graphicīack from my days of doing models in Maya, I remember this website TurboSquid where you can download lots of free models. Then we can figure out how to get it under the user control, and animating some road and background. Since I haven’t a clue what I’m doing, I thought that I’d start very simple - let’s create a floating 3D object in the browser. I don’t have a research use-case in mind yet, but I can imagine it would be super awesome to have a data or brain rendering in some future online toolkit that I might develop. My end goal is to build an in browser racing game using WebGL, which is a JavaScript API that can talk to your graphics card from the browser, and render beautiful content. This is the rationle for my little bit of fun today! It might be a little over-analytical for what comes down to just another thing I wanted to try (and waited for Christmas break to do so). While we can’t be the best at all these technologies, I think that it’s important to minimally stay on top of the field, and do enough little projects over time so that when push comes to shove, you can build what you need. There are people with entire careers devoted to making web pages, dynamic web content, or animation, so how is the researcher to fit in this expertise on top of normal work, paper writing, and teaching? I think I’ve probably laid out the problem well enough. ![]() ![]() If we think for a minute about the broad range of expertise that would be required to be both awesome at research and all web visualization technologies, it’s quite a bit. There is also a pretty solid barrier between our research environments (eg., R or Matlab), and the places that people go to learn (eg, the internet), although recent services like Plot.ly are bringing down that wall. It’s hard to present meaningful work if you don’t have good methods to display your data, and although most of us are pretty decent with plotting in Matlab and R, I would still say that it’s an undervalued skillset. An important part of being a researcher is visualization. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |