Make the World into Minecraft with HTML5 Demo
If you need any further proof that HTML5 is awesome, play around with this tech demo. Using publicly available cartographic data, a few HTML5 libraries like Three.js and some Google API’s, hacker Jaume Sánchez has made an impressive, pixelated version of our planet, or, if you give it your location, your nearby area.
Note: this isn’t Minecraft. In truth, I don’t think it is even a true voxel environment. Instead, it is a nifty graphical effect achieved by overlaying a grid over an area and sampling for the average height. Take that data, create rectangles as high as the samples, and you have a nifty-looking blocky terrain.
But none of that makes this any less cool. And you’d do yourself a favor to play around with it for a few minutes.
HTML5 is evolving
This experiment shows that HTML5 is moving beyond its experimental stage. Performance on the demo is quite impressive, even on my last-gen Mac Book Air, and it looks amazing. HTML5 is set to do far more than Flash, as a silo of information, could. Already full games are being made in it, and WebGL/Canvas has allowed for complex 3d graphics to be rendered nearly as quickly as they could be in native code. While it might be a bit before we start seeing these cool graphical things in any production site, these are good harbingers for the future.
Check out the experiment here
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