Programming 3D Applications with HTML5 and WebGL

This book is by Tony Parisi, an American pioneer of Web 3D and co-author of the VRML and X3D languages. The Chinese edition was published by Posts & Telecom Press in 2016 as part of the Turing Programming Series, translated by Pan Zheng, formerly of Baidu's FEX front-end team. Aimed at developers with a foundation in JavaScript and HTML, it systematically explains how to build 3D applications in the browser using the HTML5 technology stack, covering both desktop and mobile scenarios. The book has two parts. Part I, "Foundations," begins with HTML5 as a new visual medium and introduces the browser platform and the state of compatibility, the basic concepts of 3D graphics (coordinate systems, meshes and polygons, materials, textures and lights, transformations and matrices, cameras and projection, shaders), and then goes deep into WebGL's real-time rendering mechanism: the drawing context, the viewport, buffers and typed arrays, writing shaders and drawing primitives, working through a complete simple WebGL example. It then introduces the JavaScript 3D engine Three.js, covering project structure, renderer, scene, run loop, and lighting, and extends to geometries and meshes, scene graphs and transformation hierarchies, materials and textures, lights and shadows, custom shaders, and post-processing. It also discusses animation driven by requestAnimationFrame, tweening and keyframes, CSS3 3D transforms and filters, Canvas 2D drawing, and the Canvas renderer. Part II, "Application Development," turns to practice: the 3D content production pipeline and modeling and animation tools, game engines and frameworks (including the author's own Vizi framework), and case studies such as a 3D product browser, a game, and an interactive training system that demonstrate complex multi-object scenes and interaction, closing with a dedicated analysis of performance and adaptation issues for WebGL applications on mobile browsers. At 311 pages and about 487,000 characters, the book balances theory and practice and suits intermediate and advanced web developers and browser game developers seeking a systematic grounding in web 3D technology.