Google employees can spend 20% of their working time for their own projects. We at cubx (The CAD development department recently split from BORM) have now something similar. We get to spend every second friday afternoon for some projects of our own. The only restriction is that it has to do with computer graphics.
I chose a project that I had in mind for almost as long as I have been working for BORM. I wanted to run PointLine as a web service on a linux box. Wit the old core, that was so tightly tied to MFC, this would have been impossible. But the new unfinished core is designed to be platform independent. So, I took it as a base.
Some three years ago, I looked at vrml and x3d for the 3d in browser part. These standards didn’t have as broad support as I thought. You couldn’t do much without buying proprietary browser plugins. So I never made much progress on that. But then came WebGL. All mayor Browsers support it natively, and on top of that, my favourite web application framework recently got a WebGl widget.
So far, my research prototype doesn’t do much, but I already learned a lot that I can also use in my everyday work. I gained a better understanding of rendering pipelines, learned about shaders and ray picking …
As a side project, I set up a jenkins continous integration server that compiles the project on ubuntu and windows after every commit. Additionally, I learned about CPack, so that the result of the jenkins build is a binary deb package ready to install.
You can see the web application as it progresses here:
Usually, I would also provide a link to the sources, but this is closed source, sorry…
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