Book Image

Going the Distance with Babylon.js

By : Josh Elster
Book Image

Going the Distance with Babylon.js

By: Josh Elster

Overview of this book

Babylon.js allows anyone to effortlessly create and render 3D content in a web browser using the power of WebGL and JavaScript. 3D games and apps accessible via the web open numerous opportunities for both entertainment and profit. Developers working with Babylon.js will be able to put their knowledge to work with this guide to building a fully featured 3D game. The book provides a hands-on approach to implementation and associated methodologies that will have you up and running, and productive in no time. Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and links to fully working self-contained code snippets, you’ll start by learning about Babylon.js and the finished Space-Truckers game. You’ll also explore the development workflows involved in making the game. Focusing on a wide range of features in Babylon.js, you’ll iteratively add pieces of functionality and assets to the application being built. Once you’ve built out the basic game mechanics, you’ll learn how to bring the Space-Truckers environment to life with cut scenes, particle systems, animations, shadows, PBR materials, and more. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to structure your code, organize your workflow processes, and continuously deploy to a static website/PWA a game limited only by bandwidth and your imagination.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1: Building the Application
7
Part 2: Constructing the Game
13
Part 3: Going the Distance

AR and VR with WebXR

The inexorable march of Moore’s law has brought increasingly greater computing power into increasingly smaller microchips at a steady rate for long enough that the casual consumer has a staggering amount of raw computational silicone contained in their smartphones and tablets. There’s enough processing throughput in the average smartphone now that it’s realistic to entertain scenarios such as AR and VR.

AR is a category of applications that encompasses a large variety of different use cases and scenarios. The common feature shared by these scenarios is that they make use of a device’s camera, location, orientation, and other sensors to emplace 3D content into a depiction of the real world. VR is very similar to AR, save that instead of the content being immersed in the user’s world (the real world), the user is immersed in the content (the virtual world).

Whether considering an AR and VR experience, it is important to...