Daniel R.

Adding 3D to Your Arsenal by Charlie Schulze

Can find a bunch of information on his blog at papervision2.com. Working on redoing site with Away3D examples as almost everything is Papervision3D focused at this point.

Talk is more about how to add 3D to your application than how to do 3D modeling.

Good uses for 3D

• Games - Redbull / Farmville


• Enhancements to entertainment, automotive, educational sites


• It's just the spice not the main course

Bad Uses

• Games that should just be 2D


• Text and content heavy sites


• AmericanExpress.com

What is easy

• Getting started


• Creating rich and compelling 3D experiences
• 
  
• Moving into more advanced aspects of the 3D engines

What isn't easy

• Performance tweaks


• General optimization


• Advanced mathematics

Two main engines are Papervision3D and Away3D. Right now Away3D is planning to have better support for Molehill. Speaker has found Away3D to be more optimized (especially if you can target Flash Player 10) and robust, so if he had to pick would go with that, even though he has mostly used Papervision3D.

Both engines follow the same format of creating a view, renderer, scene, objects with materials, and a camera. Besides a few syntax differences the majority of your code will be the same regardless of which engine you are using.

One gotcha is that in Away3D by default planes lay flat, need to change that otherwise it is hard to see anything.

Likes TweenMax for all his tweening.

Working with 3D models is hard. They really need to be optimized for the engine you are working with.

Tags: 3d api flash riaunleashedboston2010

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 8:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

litl Lab by Ryan Canulla and Kathryn Rotondo

Not nearly enough hands on coding, especially since half of the session was devoted to their upcoming set-top box product but for which they didn't have a hardware demo.

Flash based SDK for developing channels. Each channel has three views: card (menu with optional slideshow), focus (mouse, keyboard support), and channel view (passive view, swipe type gestures only).

User can install multiple channel instances with different settings. Think weather widget with different zip codes all displayed at once.

Card view should have minimal animation but can reflect live data.

Focus view is the most details. Put ability to change channel options in this view and things like capturing username and passwords for remote data. Can configure a website and links that will launch in the litl chrome based browser.

Channel view should be designed for distance viewing. Think of it like a screen saver, very passive, but should be used for video and games since it provides the most screen real estate. For gestures in the view put most common in the middle (least likely, somewhat likely, most likely, somewhat likely, least likely).

Keep in mind the user can switch between the three views at any time. Be smart about what you do. Remember that data should update regularly but handle the fact that the network will come and go.

A channel can store properties in either shared properties (part of the channel, consider them public) (example same channel in marketplace with different defaults), device properties (specific to the device the channel is running on, consider them private) (example font size for webbook versus TV STB), or account properties (tied to your account, consider them protected) (example Facebook username and password).

New set-top box offering will have trackpad with slide out keyboard. Will offer gestures, accelerometers, microphone, and possibly webcam. For STB you need to worry about overscan, but the litl SDK will tell you usable dimensions when switching which view is active. Important to liquify your layout as STB dimensions will vary like crazy.

Tags: api as3 flex litl riaunleashedboston2010

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)