This is just the beginning.
One of the biggest untalked-about innovations in internet history? WebGL support. WebGL is so common nowadays that most people don’t even know they’re using it. Have you ever rendered a Google Earth landscape in insane detail? That’s WebGL. Ditched PowerPoint and Illustrator entirely for the quickness and ease of a web-based tool like Canva. That’s WebGL. Previewed a 3D render of a home or product in-browser? Played a game like Quake 3 online? Yup, also WebGL. This uniform ability to render and interact with high-quality graphics in-browser without plugins has already changed the face of the web. Now is the time to bring that speed and visual quality to business intelligence applications. We’re now in the era of WebGL 2.0 and powerful GPU dashboards. Before 2018, dashboards were constrained to HTML and Javascript. Since then, integrated GPUs from the big three hardware manufacturers (Intel, AMD, and Apple) and the adoption of the WebGL 2.0 API from the big three browser creators (Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Microsoft Edge) have unleashed a caliber of previously unimaginable browser-based dashboard quality and performance. This new generation of GPU GPU-accelerated dashboards allows us to -Drill down to record-level detail with millions of point-of-sale records -Visually explore the 44 million cell towers worldwide on a map in real-time -Run time-series animations of weather and cross-correlate crop growth -Select segments of roadways in large cities like Seoul - 13.5 million -Perform skill flow analysis with org charts of tens of thousands of employees -Track player movement through levels in a multiplayer game in real time -Automatically cross-filter structured and unstructured data types -Instantly display complex formula analysis in spreadsheet-style views This level of visibility and shareability means everyone, from data analysts to data scientists to sales managers to C-level executives, can quickly and easily view the same information interactively at a greater scale and level of detail with the same accessibility. Do you have a favorite web-enabled dashboard? Do you have a wishlist of dashboard features you want to see in the browser? Comment below and let us know what you think of the future of GPU-powered dashboards.