It is not often that you find yourself in a disused nuclear reactor from the 50s to talk about state-of-the-art web technology. For about a hundred developers and designers this is exactly what happened last Saturday in Stockholm, Sweden.

The R1 reactor played host to the Mosync hackathon organised to get developers to try out the Wormhole and Reload technologies, both of which make it very easy to build apps based on HTML5 or C++ for both feature and smartphones.

Mosync asked Mozilla to participate after a quick brownbag in their office on HTML5 a few weeks ago. So we went and gave an introduction on “HTML5 and the near-future of the web”. You can read the slides here and see a screencast with audio on YouTube.

The topics covered in the talk are:

• Converting C++ to JavaScript using Emscripten
• A few CSS demos:
  • Impress.js for fancy presentations using 3D transformation
  • The CSS book for 3D transformations simulating a book
  • Paperfold CSS to spice up a collapsible list
  • CSS 3D Clouds to render realistic clouds
  • The Box using Sprite3D.js for simulating a 3D environment like WebGL in CSS
• Issues with HTML5 Audio
  • Native audio events
  • Audio Sprites and how it shouldn’t be a problem using them
  • Are we playing yet? as a test platform to see just how much of audio support in browsers is broken
  • Probably, Maybe, No: The State of HTML5 Audio – long video – short video (Scott Schiller explaining in detail what the issues are)
  • Soundmanager 2 as an option to work around the issues with sound.
• Taking audio further:
  • Mozilla Audio Data API (Firefox only)
  • Dance.js – a hack developed by Jordan Santell and Brian Hassinger using the Mozilla Audio API.
  • Web Audio specification (Webkit)
  • Work in progress on syncing the efforts and libraries to use
• Games
  • Are we fun yet? gaming specific efforts in Firefox
  • Browserquest a multiplayer game in HTML5 using WebSockets
  • Building a game from semantic HTML
  • Page Visibility (Chrome)
  • RequestAnimationFrame (Microsoft’s post)
  • Fullscreen API (Demo)
  • Mouselock API
  • Gamepad API
• GetUserMedia:
  • Polyfill by Addy Osmani
  • Introduction by CreativeJS
  • Instant Camera
  • Effects Camera
• Mobile
  • Are we mobile yet? – showing what parts of mobile hardware can be reached via JavaScript and which can’t yet
  • APIs available for testing: Battery, Camera access, Vibration, IndexDB, sending SMS
  • Boot to Gecko
  • WebRTC draft
  • WebRTC efforts at Mozilla

And as I had some time and brought my trusty Competition Pro joystick, I thought I should give the Gamepad API a whirl and created the world’s first joystick powered kitten cube (maybe).