About WebGL

WebGL in Modern Web Applications

WebGL is a web standard that lets pages draw 2D and 3D graphics in real time, using your device's graphics chip directly. It's been part of the web for more than a decade and ships in every major browser by default — no plugin, no install, no special hardware.

Until recently, putting real 3D on a website meant a custom Flash plugin or a six-figure quote from a studio. Now anyone can drop a snippet onto a page and the device does the work. Product viewers, data visualisations, interactive maps, immersive walkthroughs — running at sixty frames per second, on a phone.

The demos

Six techniques, six demos

Each card below opens an interactive demo of a different WebGL technique. They run in real time — drag to orbit where the controls invite it, scroll to zoom, hit the fullscreen toggle for the full view. Every demo has its own short writeup of the technique and what was hard before the GPU could do it in a browser tab.