[IPython-dev] WebGL example in IPython notebook based on three.js

[David Powell]

Hello Cyrille,

Thanks for the info. In case it helps you, the reasons why I didn't go with
vispy are
- When I started this coding, the IPython notebook examples for vispy
weren't readily available (I vagely remember failing to find them with
google even though something was mentioned on the home page)
- The idea that you *have* to write low-level GLSL code seems a bit
intimidating (with three.js you can, but don't need to)
- three.js includes nice controls to pan, zoom etc. out of the box
- Because I'm trying to attract users to my software, I think it's
absolutely essential to be able to use the nbconverted output to show nice
interactive plots to potential users who haven't installed my program yet
(and who may not even be familiar with the scipy ecosystem), as a kind of
"marketing" tool.

However, I'll definitely keep an eye out for progress on vispy, it sounds
like some cool features are planned. The one thing I don't like about
three.js is that it is very much fixed around the idea of always animating
at 60 frames/sec for games etc. This means that it is chewing up
significant CPU, even if the figure if not updating.

regards
David

On 19 January 2015 at 23:30, Cyrille Rossant <cyrille.rossant at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Thanks for sharing this!
>
> I'd like to add that there's also work being done currently for
> bringing WebGL visualization to the notebook via VisPy. We don't use
> three.js but custom WebGL code generated by Python. The WebGL backend
> currently requires a live Python server, but a standalone version is
> also in the pipes.
>
> 2015-01-19 12:08 GMT+01:00 Matthias BUSSONNIER <
> bussonniermatthias at gmail.com>:
> > Hi all,
> > Le 19 janv. 2015 à 07:50, Soumith Chintala a écrit :
> >
> > This is fantastic! I was going to do some of this work myself over the
> next
> > month for iTorch (https://github.com/facebook/iTorch), and you saved me
> some
> > trouble.
> > I will take a look at your code over the next couple of days, I am
> wondering
> > if you would have any issues if I directly adapted your javascript side
> of
> > things in iTorch rather than rewriting from scratch.
> >
> >
> > We still haven't really figured it out how to share javascript in between
> > packages of different languages.
> > (well technically in 3.0 yo can install into $NBEXTENSION directory, but
> > install process is not perfect)
> > If you can figured that out, and that all kernels agree on a set of
> > relatively common JS "plugins"  that
> > are often used we might be able to work on making  theses plugin
> available
> > on nbviewer.
> >
> > Long term planning of course, but I'd like people to keep that in mind.
> >
> > --
> > M
> >
> >
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> >
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