Webphysics: A parallel rigid body simulation framework for web applications

Abstract

Due to the ubiquity of web browser engines and the advent of modern web standards (like HTML5), software industry tends to use web application as an alternative to traditional native application. Web app development commonly uses script language (like JavaScript, CSS), the low performance language which significantly hinders real-time execution of physics simulation. We design a new framework to achieve real-time physics simulation engine. The key novelty lies at: we choose native implementation for computing intensive functions in physics simulation, and bind native implementation with JavaScript APIs, then we only expose JavaScript APIs through web browser engine to developers but still calling native implementation. Based on this model, we build WebPhysics: the first 2D simulation engine targeting on real-time web applications, which is seamlessly compatible to both de-facto standard simulation engine (Box2D) and browser engine (Webkit).We also explore and implement a parallel rigid body simulation (Box2DOCL) in the context of web app framework to obtain further performance improvement. Our experiments show significant performance improvement in simulation time.