Our designer is building her personal portfolio website, and she’s way less conservative than me with her layouts. In order to actually implement her design I found out about CSS scroll-snapping, and the nested selector.
The latter has reached Baseline status in December 2023, so it makes sense that I didn’t know about it yet!
MemoryCache, augmenting local AI with browser data
OpenSource macOS AP copilot using vision and voice
Instructions on running local LLM on iOS
Intel CEO against the CUDA moat
FunSearch: Making new discoveries in mathematical sciences using Large Language Models, by Google DeepMind
Advancements in machine learning for machine learning: Machine Learning compilers by Google Researc
Exploring the design space of “remote scene approximation“.
Use the GPU, Luke! – a GPU programming tutorial for non-graphic-programmers
Permacomputing Aesthetics: Potential and Limits of Constraints in Computational Art, Design and Culture
Bitsy Museum Hack: bitsy is a really fun engine for creating bit-art powered web games, and this hack allows one to create a “museum”, a central hub from which several games or experiences can be accessed. It might be fun to integrate bitsy experiences in our high-dimensionality sites!
Instrument position in Immersive Audio: an empirical review of award-winning practices
Launch of Brasiliana, a common place on the web for Brazilian museums (from September)
Offpunk: a delightful command-line first browser, sort of a modern Lynx
Media queries for HTML Video: building responsive video is very important for making interactive documentaries work on mobile devices
Paperless: a self-hostable document archive platform, complete with OCR
Motivated by coming across the embedded post on Mastodon, we looked into existing solutions for iOS.
We found this one, which is very sleek, but a bit on the expensive side: https://launch.variant3d.com/
Meta: a collection of Gaussian Splatting stuff https://aras-p.info/blog/2023/12/08/Gaussian-explosion/
https://80.lv/articles/new-relightable-animatable-realistic-avatars-from-meta/
https://neuralradiancefields.io/splatam-slam-with-speed-precision-and-gaussian-splats/
Triplex is not actually a new project, but it is still in early access.
Source code. Some really impressive demos, particularly the map and Berlin.
We’re starting a new series, periodically highlighting new tools and advancements that help to build immersive experiences on the open web. Look for more of these posts in the tools category. These can be new products, significant updates, or simply new discoveries.
A small library for building watch-like user interfaces in a-frame, supporting hand tracking. There is even a demo, and here is the announcement tweet with a brief video.
Three.js is the basis for a lot of immersive web experiences, including a-frame. drei-vanilla is a collection of threejs modules and helpers, and they just released a splat module, which allows for the inclusion of multiple splats in a scene with the <Splat src={url} /> syntax.
This one is not a new tool, but an interesting use of an interesting tool.
The Sphere in Las Vegas is a super cool engineering project. Weirdly enough the public reaction seems to focus more on the external part, which is being used for ads, and meta-ads like this one:
Developer Alexandre Devaux (who regularly posts super interesting webXR projects, check out this splat experiment of his) created a threejs page in which one can apply an arbitrary shader to the sphere. There are 5 examples, and you can also write your own, or copy-paste from the Hacker News thread, the smiley face is an highlight.
This one is a little exoteric. There is a company called Rokid, they make AR glasses and some pretty interesting software to go along, especially related to human-computer interaction. They seem to have several laboratories, one of which is called M-CreativeLab, and they run a project called JSAR, which is somehow related to the YodaOS used on the Rokid AR glasses. They have developed XSML, yet another 3D HTML-like language, SCSS, a spatial version of CSS, and a TypeScript runtime. Combined together these allow for the creation of web-based 3D scenes that can be embedded in a website or inside a native application. There is support for Babylon.js and Unity, and a Visual Studio Code extension.
There are a couple of demo scenes in their GitHub repository, which can be tested in a XSML runtime. For example we can go here: https://github.com/M-CreativeLab/jsar-gallery-flatten-lion, copy the CDN link https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/M-CreativeLab/jsar-gallery-flatten-lion@main/lib/lion.xsml and paste it into the runtime hosted here: https://m-creativelab.github.io/jsar-dom/
We’ll get the scene in the Babylon.js inspector. The cool thing is that the XSML file is very easy to understand, for anyone who knows HTML.
As a personal aside, my one point of criticism is how much of the documentation, and even how much of the code, is written in Chinese. I strongly believe that computers should be used in English, and that having a lingua franca for technical work is extremely important, but I suspect this is now considered part of my 90s techno-optimism. Coming from a native English speaker it would also probably sound like some sort of xenophobia, luckily that’s not the case.
Extremely interesting plant simulations by undergrad (serious kudos!) Max Richter. The graph editor is so nice to play with!