WebGL Engine Examples
Here’s a curated collection of examples of how to use the WWT WebGL Engine in your own web projects.
Note: Due to limitations in our web infrastructure, these examples will only work if you access them through unencrypted HTTP, not secure HTTPS. Please ensure that you are not visiting this site over an HTTPS channel.
The above limitation is also why these examples are stored independently from the main WebGL Engine Reference manual. We hope to integrate the reference manual and our library of examples more tightly in the future.
Your contributions are more than welcome! If you’d like to add an example, please submit a pull request against the wwt-web-examples repository with your addition.
Table of contents
Targeted Examples
Simple Viewer
A minimal example showing how to embed the WWT engine in a webpage.
By: Phil Rosenfield.
Poly Annotations Demo
Shows how to create some basic geometric annotations.
By: Phil Rosenfield.
“Arrived” Event Demo
Shows how to make something happen when the view arrives at a destination.
By: Phil Rosenfield.
“Click” Event Demo
Shows how to make something happen when the user clicks on the screen.
By: Phil Rosenfield.
FOV Control
Shows how to control the field-of-view (FOV) size. NOTE: known bug, see https://github.com/WorldWideTelescope/wwt-web-examples/issues/1.
By: Phil Rosenfield.
Local View Perspective
Shows how to match the sky view to that from a given location on Earth.
By: Phil Rosenfield.
Load Additional Imagery
Shows how to load and show additional imagery in the viewer. NOTE: temporarily broken, see https://github.com/WorldWideTelescope/wwt-web-examples/issues/2.
By: Phil Rosenfield.
Load Tours
Shows how to load, show, and control tours in the viewer.
By: Phil Rosenfield.
City Explorer
An example in which you can command the view to show various cities.
By: Phil Rosenfield.
Tour Mars
An example in which you can command the view to tour various features on Mars. NOTE: known bug, https://github.com/WorldWideTelescope/wwt-web-examples/issues/3.
By: Phil Rosenfield.
Planetary Surface Explorer 1
Explore landmarks on the surfaces of the Earth, the Moon, and Mars.
By: Phil Rosenfield.
Planetary Surface Explorer 2
Explore landmarks on the surfaces of additional celestial bodies.
By: Phil Rosenfield.
Messier Object Tour
Tour the objects in the famous Messier Catalog.
By: Phil Rosenfield.
Examples on the Main Website
There are a few additional examples integrated into the main WWT website:
- ImportImage (implemented in ImportImage.js)
- Spectroscopy (implemented in Spectroscopy.js)
- Great Observatories (implemented in Observatories.js)
- Planet Explorer (implemented in PlanetExplorer.js)
WebGL Engine in the Wild
Here are some folks that use the WebGL engine out “in the wild”! Not all of these have source code on GitHub, but since it’s the web, you can always open up these pages in “View Source” or your browser’s Developer Tools and start exploring …
Are you using the WebGL engine in a project of your own? We would love to hear from you! Please file a pull request to add your project to this list.
The WWT Webclient
Of course, the WWT webclient is powered by the WebGL engine! The source code to the frontend is mixed between the wwt-web-client and wwt-website repositories.
pywwt
Another official WWT project, the pywwt Python module allows you to embed the WWT WebGL engine in Jupyter notebooks and JupyterLab environments, allowing researchers to seamlessly visualize spatial astronomical data in context. Source code lives in the pywwt repository.
Chandra Source Catalog 2.0
Version 2.0 of the Chandra Source Catalog includes a WWT-powered interactive visualizer of its survey data.
“What is Chandra Doing Now?”
What is Chandra Doing Now? is a real-time dashboard of the Chandra space telescope’s activities. The “Interactive” view is powered by WWT. Its source code is in the doug_burke/chandraobs repository on BitBucket.
GLIMPSE360 Viewer
The GLIMPSE360 project is an infrared panorama of the Milky Way made with the Spitzer space telescope. You can explore the full dataset in their interactive explorer.
ADS All Sky Survey
The ADS All Sky Survey maps papers from the astronomical literature onto the sky. The ADSASS WWT viewer makes it possible to explore and filter this dataset.
Interactive Planck Data Viewer
The Planck satellite observed the whole sky in a suite of microwave bands. You can explore the data using — you guessed it — an interactive viewer powered by the WWT WebGL engine.
Milky Way 3D
“MilkyWay3D.org is a tool intended to organize and curate links to information about data sets relevant to our 3D understanding of the Milky Way.” The main milkyway3d.org page features a WWT-powered data exploration interface.
Sky Banana Party!
An small (and unfinished) web app project aiming to show the localizations of gravitational-wave events from LIGO and VIRGO immersively. View the current status at http://skybanana.party. Source code in the sky-banana-party repository.