Inspired by the PaperVision project and subsequently keen to dust off ye olde mb3D Engine… I had an idea (it was around 4am - so perhaps better described as a delusion!) to inject the topical goodness of digg into one of my old Flash/ActionScript projects.
It’s still a little rusty and perhaps doesn’t accomplish much more than looking pretty… the mb3Digg Engine takes the RSS feed from the digg.com homepage and scatters the stories around with the blessing of each of the three virtual dimensions.
I was initally intending to use the dimensions to represent meaningful information - for example, the X axis could represent number of diggs, the Y axis could represent date published and the Z axis could signify the number of comments. Employing an approach such as this would enable us to sort the information just by switching our viewing angle. The problem with the proposed method is that everything is positive and would be pushed toward one corner of the grid. I’ll reflect on this - hopefully someone out there will help me come up with a solution.
mb3Digg Instructions
Manipulation of the display hasn’t really changed - though in this incarnation you can click on the yellow box with the digg count to zoom to that story (you may have to slightly rotate the camera to line it up properly). Clicking “digg it” will open up the respective digg page in a new window (if your popup blocker doesn’t stop it).
Here are the controls for those of you who may have just joined us:
- Click anywhere on the applet to focus on it
Update: After a great suggestion, I’ve updated the controls to now work with the mouse.
Mouse Movement
- Move the mouse to the left and right of the window to rotate
- Move the mouse to the top and bottom of the window to go up and down
- Use the mouse scroll wheel to go forwards and backwards (this will only work after you’ve clicked on the flash window to activate it)
Keyboard Movement
- LEFT and RIGHT arrow keys - pans camera left and right
- UP and DOWN arrow keys - moves camera forwards and backwards
- R and F - moves the camera up and down the y axis
Rotation
- A and D - rotates the camera around its y axis (yaw)
- W and S - rotates the camera around its x axis (pitch)
- Q and E - rotates the camera around its z axis (roll)
Misc
- V - levels the camera (useful when you get lost!)
I hope you find it interesting. Let me know if you can think of how we can make it better. Perhaps I should do a version where the camera is stationary and the stories all scroll past?
Update: Check out the fullscreen version here
Update 2: If you like what you see, go and digg it here
