Dylan is an independent consultant who has been building data-driven web applications since the 1990s. He’s managed teams, taught workshops, and worked on everything from tiny standalone websites to complex distributed systems. He’s a Microsoft MVP, and he regularly speaks at conferences and user groups all over the world.
Dylan is the creator of the Rockstar programming language, and is known for his live music shows featuring software-themed parodies of classic rock songs. He’s online at dylanbeattie.net and on Twitter as @dylanbeattie.
Dylan's Talk
It's So Shiny! A Pure JavaScript Ray-Tracer
It's hard to imagine a world without computer generated imagery. Films, television, games, art, advertising... CGI gives artists, designers, and film-makers the tools to bring fantastic fictional worlds to life. And while it wasn't all that long ago that rendering photorealistic images required a supercomputer, today we can do it right in our browser.
In this session, Dylan Beattie will explain the principles behind ray-tracing, the technique behind most modern computer graphics. - and then, using modern JavaScript APIs like web workers, clamped arrays and ES modules, we'll create a pure JavaScript ray tracer that runs directly in your browser. We'll learn how to simulate lighting, shading, reflection, and visual effects to create photo-realistic scenes, we'll dust off some gnarly mathematics that you probably haven't seen since high school and find out that it's actually pretty useful after all, and we'll create a whole lot of pictures of shiny things.
Catch Dylan's talk at Modern Frontends Live!
Dylan's Socials
https://twitter.com/dylanbeattie
