Monday 11 March 2013

WebGL - not ready for prime time?

So one of the visualizations I wanted to add to the HiveMindMap website was a 3D map of the globe using the software here.

The good news is the images are quite interesting and respond very quickly to mouse and keyboard events:

The bad news is :

  1. A limited set of browsers support WebGL
  2. Those that do seem unstable
Using the latest versions of Chrome and Safari on OSX I have found that browser windows will occasionally burst into periods of rapid flashing that look like they could induce epileptic fits. Also the screen will occasionally lock up a machine with the dreaded spinning beach ball for long periods. This happened on both desktop and laptop machines.
For these reasons I have opted to stick with a Google Earth KML file for this sort of content until WebGL support improves.



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