Saturday, November 5, 2011

Alpha Review Feedback

I have just gotten the comments back from our "senior review panel" at the Alpha Review. I think mostly it went well and most are satisfied with the progress so far. However, there seem to be two main issues, which I will address here:

1. Motivation for WebGL
The question that most reviewers had was what is the point of WebGL. How is WebGL better than, say, a web plug-in? What are the benefits of putting such a renderer on the web? Are there any web-based features that could make it special?

I think one of the factors here is that I did not realize most people do knot quite know what actually WebGL is, and thus I did not quite explain fully what WebGL is. I would need to give it it's own slide next time I do a presentation. In addition, I'll also have to motivate it more with concrete benefits such as:
  1. Being immediately accessible anywhere, since it is native to modern browsers
  2. Having direct access to the hardware through GLSL
  3. Exhibiting all capabilities of web-based applications, operating in a browser through Javascript, such that it could be very easily extended with other features

2. CPU / GPU Details
There are two things here that reviewers wanted to see: 1) CPU/GPU breakdown with clear division, and 2) justification for putting processes on the CPU/GPU. In general, I feel that is feedback is definitely true, and does somewhat reflect the state of my progress. It is this division of CPU/GPU where I was and still am figuring out. As I move along the process, I find out where the limitations are and what makes more sense, so it might seem unclear now because I still am trying to figure it out for myself.

But in general, I am feeling good about the feedback. Most reviewers are satisfied with the progress and feel that this project is technically challenging.

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