D3GL Tutorials

My friend Daniel Posch and I created D3GL as a final project for CS 448B at Stanford, a course titled Data Visualization. Our motivation stemmed from when we were working on an interactive visualization assignment that involved using raw WebGL. It was painful. We decided that it shouldn't be so.

D3GL is a D3 plug-in library that lets users control WebGL elements and bind data in an intuitive way. WebGL is a powerful but unwieldy Javascript library, the only way to do hardware- accelerated 3D rendering in the browser. It is a thin wrapper on a low-level C API called OpenGL ES. D3GL abstracts away the setup and provides the user with a streamlined interface to render and manipulate data visualizations. It currently supports interactions including zoom, rotation, and selection with various data primitives such as points, user-defined overlays, shapes, and bars on globes.

D3GL is under heavy development at the moment, and you can check out the most recent developments at http://github.com/jiwonkim/d3gl.

You can check out the official D3GL site at http://d3gl.org.
Check out D3.js, the library that D3GL builds on top of, at http://d3js.org.

These tutorials for D3GL are aimed for people familiar with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, although experience with D3 is unnecessary. The tutorials will cover the following:

00. Getting started
01. Creating globes
02. Binding data to each globe
03. Intro to data primitives with Points
04. Intro to mouse events with Points
05. The Painter primitive
06. Interacting with Painter
07. The Bars primitive
08. Interacting with Bars
09. The Shapes primitive
10. Binding data to Shapes using default "countries" shape
11. Creating a custom shape texture for Shapes
12. The Arcs primitive
13. Interacting with arcs
14. Creating models with D3GL Model
15. Interacting with models

As more data visualization types and primitives are added to D3GL, the list will grow. Existing tutorials will be linked - unlinked tutorials are yet to be written.

In addition to explaining basic D3GL concepts and usages, these tutorials will also discuss the internal implementation of each feature for those who are interested in adding to the open-source development of D3GL.