Short version: Kieth Clark has a 3D html fps shooter demo. It uses 3d tansforms on html5 elements to produce a 3D world experience. It is not VR. Is there an API to view it stereoscopically?
I have a similar engine. I came up with a way to view it stereoscopically using Cardboard-style viewer, 3D TV/Monitor, or red/cyan anaglyph glasses. I had to use a pair of iframes, however, and load a copy of the "world" document into each frame, however.
This doubles the load on the gpu, however, requires duplicates of all changes to "the world" for both iframes, and workarounds for focusable items such as textareas. This all works great, but diminishes the capacity for detail without RAF noticably slowing down and getting jumpy. Especially true in Firefox on mobile, and of course there is also the added problem of security limitations on iframes.
If theres an API to just view and control a 3D html5 page in stereo without explicitly duplicating everything that would make things a lot simpler and more efficient.
I'm using a Google Chrome on Galaxy Note 3 as my standard-level target-device, if anyone needs to know.
Long version (old):
I have a 3d game I'm writing with native html5/css3/javascript. It is primarily for mobile and already contains a fully-functional camera system with the ability to zoom in or out of first-person, second-person, overhead etc, rotate the yaw and pitch of the view, as well as location on the map around the avatar, etc. Is there an easy way to view it stereoscopically? It will be embedded in an Android app, or at least accessed through one, or through Chrome as a web-app. I thought Chrome Dev with VR Shell would be a possibility to try it out and hopefully integrate into an app eventually. Not having luck with that yet. Theoretically, I just need to be able to view an ordinary html5 page that has css3 3d transforms. For example, if you had a 3d cube made of divs or whatever, to view it with two points of view, one for each eye, without changing anything in the page itself. Basically, if you could view anything 3d in the page stereoscopically, much like the VR Shell sounds like, it should work. All I seem to come up with is how to turn on the flag in Chrome Dev, but I'm not seeing anything to actually activate it. It's been fully restarted etc. The page is already 3d and fully-functional with orientation control in first-person or otherwise. All I seem to find are how to turn it on or about 3d videos. Can this be done in Googles VR libs for Studio without using all the other stuff? I just need the second eyeball.
Ok. Was hoping an api existed for this, but my solution was to make a parent document with two iFrames and load the doc with the 3d tranforms into both iframes. Then offset the perspective-origin in each about 1% (i.e. 49% in one and 51% in the other). Worked great without added mods using device orientation, but obvi not for mouse control. Ideally, both iframed documents should be controlled from js in the parent doc. Downside is you have to control two objects for every change, and complications arise if you have inputs or textareas that take exclusive focus. Fixed all that, but this is the down-low version of the solution.
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I'd like to create a polygon like on picture below, but it should rotating and bouncing between the borders of a web page, also it should be at the background and doesn't interfere with other elements of a web page.
I can do this in pure JavaScript with a lot of math, but maybe there's another approach which can simplify this task?
UPDATE: It need to work without user actions on Safari/Chrome/FF, at least few latest releases of these browsers, and mobile devices of course.
Any recommendations on zooming a large image and panning around? ideally inline on the page.
I've been using PanoJS (aka GSV2), but now more people are using iPhone/iPad/Android type devices, this library is either too slow, or the older versions do not support dragging (the one I'm using at the moment).
http://code.google.com/p/panojs/
http://www.dimin.net/software/panojs/
My current thought is that using the tiled images approach is too much for these little processors (at maximum zoom trying to drag 144 individual images, from a 3000 x 3000px original image, where each tile is 250x250px).
So probably looking more at loading the original image in an with a set width/height... and either writing my own JS to zoom/drag, or using another library (which I can't seem to find at the moment)... then there is the question of using jQuery (with jQuery UI for draggable support), or just writing the raw JS myself to keep the amount of code down.
More so answering my own question, as the standard libraries don't seem to work as well as I needed, I ended up creating my own solution:
https://github.com/craigfrancis/zoomify
The intention is that you can copy this code and then customise it to your own particular requirements... so ideally you should be able to read/understand the code, rather than just dropping it into your project and hoping for the best.
I would suggest making a viewport for mobile devices of screen width.
set all the images that are outside the viewport for more than one tile to display:none.
Then when the user pans just update the display property.
That way the browser will mainly compute a large element moving with a few images, and then compute the on and off state of some images.
a lot less graphics intensive than to recalculate a graphics heavy div element.
After looking around for this too, I decided to use OpenSeadragon (New BSD licence), an open-source, web-based viewer for high-resolution zoomable images (desktop and mobile). I needed it for the Image Pyramid sources with Multi-Image support and filtering capabilities (via one of a multitude of plugins)
Another strong contender was OpenLayers (2-Clause BSD). Here's a simple example with a static image, and here's the complete list of examples.
I'm working on a prototype system which will act as a proof of concept that an existing system can be made a lot more interactive.
It basically emulates our main software package but over the internet using JSONP requests to update a load of images and Raphael vectors to make it look like everything's running.
I'm having trouble on Chrome however with Raphael not drawing vectors "off-screen". What I mean by "off-screen" is that the main app runs through an iframe as it relies on cross-domain long poll comet through AJAX to get communicate back and forth. Below is an image demonstrating what I mean.
Here I've scrolled a long a little bit in the iframe to look at the bits "offscreen" and you can hopefully see that the grey arrows aren't rendered. I've used Chrome's developer tools to highlight over the SVN tag, showing that it's only given 450px by 810px to the SVG tag, which is the same size allocated for the iframe.
It's worth pointing out that it renders fine in Firefox. Any ideas?
I've had a similar problem and found a bug report for the WebKit project that seemed related:
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64823
According to the comments, it's a bug in the rendering engine and there's no workaround aside from losing the iframe or resorting to other means of scrolling the SVG viewport (like moving all the elements within the SVG element).
On the upside, version 16.0.912.21 has been released to the beta channel today and it seems that the bug has been fixed. I've also checked the latest chromium build (17.something) and the bug hasn't resurfaced. I'm guessing the fix should find its way into the stable channel in a couple of weeks.
What is the best cross-browser way to get a flat mouse coordinate input data and simple callback for mouse events for my rectangular game area on my web page, even when it has loads of larger and smaller images and text string overlaid haphazard onto it?
And what is the best way to insert or remove a text string or semi-transparent image overlay at an arbitrary location (and Z order, specified relative to existing objects) in a board game rectangle with cross-browser DHTML?
And how can I stop the user selecting part or all of my montage of images (I just want them to interact with it as if it was Flash), and can I stop the right click menus coming up in IE, FF etc?
I want to do this without Flash because I want something that will work both on desktops and on iPhone and potentially other mobile platforms too.
I appreciate there are serious limitations (eg less image scaling capabilities, not vector, no rotation capability) to what I can do if I'm not using Flash but I'm very interested to know what capabilities are available.
Are there perhaps any frameworks available to make it easier than coding from scratch?
Would J/Query be a good match for some of the requirements? What else do I need?
I would recommend Google Web Toolkit. It lets you program in Java, which gives you all the type-safety and nice IDE functionality that Java entails, but compiles to Javascript so that you can just run it in a browser. It also does a ton of optimization and supports tons of features.
jQuery is excellent at doing this. I used jQuery's UI and Ajax functionality to implement the frontend for a game of chess.
I made it a little easier by creating an 8-by-8 table with unique div names for each tile, so Javascript can access them by getting the elements by id. If you can't create something like that, you do have the option of placing elements anywhere on the page (either absolute or relative to a given element). You can also easily change the z-index, including when the use is dragging a piece or when they have dropped it.
As far as disable right click and item selection goes, that's something that I didn't figure out how to do. You might want to take a look at some other Ajax games like Grand Strategy, which are much more polished than my experiment and may have figured out how to do this.
There are two main APIs for working with arbitrary drawing and positioning on the web, Canvas and SVG.
Take a look at Chrome Canvas Experiments and the Raphael Javascript toolkit to see some examples and Javascript abstractions.
The key is element.style.position = 'absolute'. To illustrate just what's possible here's how far I've managed to push javascript (and from scratch at that!):
http://slebetman.110mb.com/tank3.html - RTS in DOM! Click on units/squads then click somewhere else to tell them where to go. You can control both sides.
Are there any advanced solutions for capturing a hand drawing (from a tablet, touch screen or iPad like device) on a web site in JavaScript, and storing it on server side?
Essentially, this would be a simple mouse drawing canvas with the specialty that its resolution (i.e. the number of mouse movements it catches per second) needs to be very high, otherwise round lines in the drawing will become "polygonal" when moving the pen / mouse fast:
(if this weren't the case, the inputDraw solution suggested by #Gregory would be 100% perfect.)
It would also have to have a high level of graphical quality, i.e. antialias the penstroke. Nothing fancy here but a MS Paint style, 1x1 Pixel stroke won't cut it.
I find this a very interesting thing in general, seeing as Tablet PCs are becoming at least a bit more common. (Not that they get the attention I feel they deserve).
Any suggestions are highly appreciated. I would prefer an Open Source solution, but I am also open to proprietary solutions like ActiveX controls or Java Applets.
FF4, Chrome support is a must; Opera, IE8/9 support is desired.
Please note that most "canvas" libraries around, and most answers to other questions similar to mine, refer to programmatically drawing onto a canvas. This is not what I am looking for. I am looking for something that records the actual pen or mouse movements of the user drawing on a certain area.
Starting a bounty out of curiosity whether anything has changed during the time since this question was asked.
I doubt you'll get anything higher resolution than the "onmousemove" event gives you, without writing an efficient assembler program on some embedded system custom built for the purpose. You run inside an OS, you play by the OS's rules, which means you're limited by the frequency of the timeslices an OS will give you. (usually about 100 per second, fluxuating depending on load) I've not used a tablet that can overcome the "polygon" problem, and I've used some high end tablets. Photoshop overcomes the problem with cubic interpolation.
That is, unless, you have a very special tablet that will capture many movement events and queue them up to some internal buffer, and send a whole packet of coordinates at a time when it dispatches data to the OS. I've looked at tablet api's though, and they only give one set of coordinates at a time, so if this is going to happen, you'll need custom hardware, and a custom driver, and custom apis that can handle packets of multiple coordinates.
Or you could just use a damned canvas tag, the onmousemove event, event.pageX|pageY some cubic interpolation, the "toDataURI" api of canvas, post the result to your php script, and then just say you did all that other fancy stuff.
onmousemove, in my tests, will give you one event per pixel of movement, limited only by the speed of the event loop in the browser. You'll get sparse data points (polygons) with fast movement and that's as good as it gets without a huge research grant and a hardware designer. Deal.
there are some applets for this in the oekaki world: Shi painter, Chibipaint or PaintBBS. Here you have php classes for integration.
Drawings produced by these applets can have quite good quality. If you register in oekakicentral.com you can see all the galleries and some drawings have an animation link that shows how was it drawn (it depends on the applet), so you can compare the possibilities of the applets. Some of them are open source.
Edit: See also this made in HTML 5.
Have a look at <InputDraw/>: a flash component that turns freehand drawing into SVG. Then you could send back the generated SVG to your server.
It's free for non commercial use. According to their site, commercial use price is 29€. It's not open source though.
IMHO it's worth a look.
Alternatively, you implement something based on svg-edit which is open source and uses jQuery (demo). If requires the Google Frame Plugin for IE6+ support though.
EDIT: I just found the svg-freehand-signature project (demo) that captures your handwritten signature and sends it to a server as a SVG using POST. It's distributed as a straight-forward and self-contained zip (works out of the box with Safari and Firefox, you may want to combine it with svgweb that brings SVG support to Internet Explorer).
EDIT: I successfully combined Cesar Oliveira's canvaslol (just look at the source of the page to see how it works) with ExplorerCanvas to have something on IE. You can also have a look at Anne van Kesteren's Paintr experiment.
markup.io is doing that with an algorithm applied after the mouseup.
I asked a similar question recently, and got interesting but not satisfying answers: Is there any way to accelerate the mousemove event?