The Revision 2012 party took place in Saarbrücken, Germany over the Easter weekend. Hundreds of people gathered together and participated in the competitions, releasing their latest music, graphics and demos. One of those contests was for the best “Web Browser Demo”. Several demos were shown on the big screen, but Radiotherapy by Alcatraz and Scoopex ran away with 1st place.
The demo is a smooth WebGL journey through several shiny and impressive sequences. If your GPU can cope then pressing F11 for full-screen is the best way to view it. The 3D objects created by Noogman really set the tone and are all linked together with detailed pieces of 2D artwork by Peach, Wade and Core. Carrying you through the visual journey is a haunting soundtrack by Keito. As you may expect the coder Digi didn’t use any framework for the demo, instead rolling everything in straight JavaScript. The code isn’t packed or obfuscated so is easily read by anyone wanting to examine how the beautiful scenes were constructed.
Even if you don’t really “get” the point of demos there’s still plenty to admire from the creative and technical perspectives alone. It’s impressive that it works even back to Firefox 4.0, running nicely on Opera, Linux and other oft-neglected environments. Although a modern browser helps full respect to Digi for not enforcing the need for one. If this is any indication of the quality of demo now produced in-browser then I look forward to seeing what else may appear from the other parties taking place over the rest of the year. If you’d like to learn more about the origin of the demoscene and what it means today this is an excellent documentary on the subject.