As we do with most new concepts, we'll start with an example. In the sources for this chapter, you'll find an example with the name 01-sprites.html. Open this example and you'll see a grid of very uninteresting-looking colored cubes, as shown in the following screenshot:
We've also enabled the mouse controls for this example, so you can use the mouse or your trackpad to navigate around this scene. One thing you'll notice is that no matter how you look at the squares, they will always look the same. For instance, the following screenshot shows a view of the same scene from a different position:
What you see in this screenshot are a number of sprites. A sprite is a 2D plane that always faces the camera. If you create a sprite without any properties, they are rendered as small, white, two-dimensional...