Let’s be honest, Interactive Awards don’t mean shit. Unless they’re awards people have heard of, real people, not just people who are in the running for them. But the BAFTA in the UK, like the Oscar in the US, is pretty much universal currency, bring one of those home and there’s no explanation needed.
In 2003 BAFTA introduced a host of “Interactive BAFTAs”, a project I worked on was nominated for one in 2004, but they were quietly dropped in 2005 for reasons unknown. There still exist a few hotly contested Interactive awards buried within other events though, such as the Interactive category at the Children’s BAFTAs, which was last year won by my old company Littleloud. Tonight was a second Brighton triumph as Seb’s PlugIn Media posse landed the very same award for their excellent Big And Small site.
PlugIn walked it home really. I’ve never seen such a level of detail in a childrens game, it was a no brainer. If my four year old had been judging it he’d have gone for the same.
I had absolutely no part in this particular scoop but still I am feeling the joy, if only in the reflected glow upon Brighton’s Flash community. Happy days.
I’m sure this isn’t the first PaperVision game, but I might make claim on it being the simplest. But then I only really had a day free to do this, which doesn’t allow the time for any sexy 3D modelling or texturing. Otherwise, you’d be looking at day-glo Tron Light Cycles racing around the grid below, rather than blue blobs. The keys are A/D or Left/Right arrows, and the idea is to collect the green things. The rest you can work out for yourself. Fullscreen version here.
What you’re looking at is PaperVision 3D. Not the silly snake game, but the Flash 3D engine rendering all those polygons. PV3D is probably the greatest Flash Open Source success story to date. At my local nerd club, a recurring topic of conversation is the “Open Source question” – i.e. should I open source my code or not, and what exactly do I gain by giving away my work for nothing? The creators of PaperVision, Carlos Ulloa, John Grden and the rest of the crew, answer this question. Rather than being the authors of a great 3D engine no-one knows about, by setting their code free they have become the leading experts in a 3D engine that EVERYONE uses.
At November’s FOTB conference PV3D was on every developer’s lips, within six months even clients are asking for PaperVision. By giving away their work, the creators of PV3D have made themselves coding mega-stars. This is how Open Sourcing works, the trade is in kudos, not commodities. The Open Source movement is the economic paradigm shift of the 20th Century, it happened in software five years ago, last year it made it’s mark on music, this year it will be publishing. The year after that … who knows. As the Chili Peppers advised, give it away, give it away, give it away now…
It’s been six months at least since I’ve had the spare time for any ‘leisure’ coding but I finally found a few hours to get back into my Flash isometric 3D engine this week. And I’m really chuffed with what I’ve achieved.
You can move the ball with keys QAOP (once you’ve clicked on the movie) but the really interesting bit is the sliders. Thanks to AS3’s speed, I can now redraw the isometric space at runtime, so it is a “true” 3D engine.
Transitions – utterly useless from a usability perspective? Rubbish.
Transitions can often contribute more to an application’s look and feel than fonts, colours and sounds. Most of what we present as multimedia comes down to pages of data, laid out attractively, with some way of navigating in-between them. But why have just a simple page to page sequence when, with thoughtful use of transitions, you can give a sense of space. A few examples:
http://www.leoburnett.com/
This is an old favourite, but still a goodie. It’s a portfolio site that is just a series of pages, but the way they are connected together makes it feel like a 3d environment to be explored. The pen scribble that you leave behind is the most inspired trick, as this a) orients you to show where you’ve been, b) leaves ‘evidence of use‘ behind as you explore (much underused in multimedia).
http://www.sixthsenseuk.com/
This is by our local chums futurlab, and I like it a lot. The desktop metaphor is a well used cliche, but to do it as smoothly as this you find yourself exploring just for the joy of watching the transitions, not just to find what you’re looking for.
http://www.wefeelfine.org/
This isn’t Flash, it’s processing, but there are plenty of great navigation ideas in here. In fact it’s essentially a site of nothing but experimental navigation ideas. Again, it is so visually appealing it wouldn’t matter if this was data about the sale of dental equipment, it would still be great.
There were two sessions at FOTB that got me thinking about transitions, especially as FM are planning a showcase site at the moment, which will be a great opportunity for a bit of experimental navigation. Firstly, Tink’s Flashing Flex talk, showed how simple it is to style Flex and not feel limited by the framework. There’s no reason Flex cannot have the same dynamic animation behind it as Flash does, because they are essentially the same product after all.
Secondly, Carlos Ulloa’s demonstrations of Papervision showed how it can be used for much more than just animating 3d fish and spaceships. Just a simple 3d transition between two planes can make the difference between an application being a series of pages to it being an “environment”. See Carlos’s work for Sony Bravia as a good example.
Considering we have only been using them for 10-15 years, we have already become very attached to our visual metaphors – documents, desktops, folders etc… But as the technology advances more sophisticated options have become available to us. We don’t necessarily have to navigate between documents any more, instead we can explore environments.
3D is Flash has been a long time coming, but it has arrived in style courtesy of the open source PaperVision project, which demonstrates that Flash 9 is now capable of PlayStation 1 level graphics. So far most of the recent Flash 3D projects I have seen have been game oriented, including my own isometric 3D engine, but I was very impressed to see that Outsmart Labs a thinking a little bigger. They have created a demo 3D environment that allows you to walk between information panels; Flex components as wall mounted screens, rather than laid out flat on a surface.
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