When they’re not playing/watching/talking about the All Blacks and Rugby Union in general, New Zealanders can actually come up with some interesting stuff! Don’t believe me? Check this out…
Outsmart is a NZ-based RIA development studio that has just given us a peek into their new 3D rendering platform in Flex. More info and pics are just a click away…
Using rendering methods similar to that seen in the Papervision 3D project, Outsmart have developed a 3D engine that is capable of (from their blog):
- Realtime polygon rendering engine with texture mapping
- Perspective and isometric rendering modes
- Free and/or fixed camera control
- Depth of field rendering effects
- Ability to project any Flex UI, Flash SWF or FLV onto any 3D surface
- Ability to interact with a Flex UI in 3D space
The online demo puts you in control of an animated character (lets call him Timmy!) who moves around the stage when you click the floor. Dragging the floor rotates the camera and SHIFT+drag zooms it in and out (which led to my discovery that SHIFT + Mouse Wheel is the same as “Back” and “Forward” in Firefox).
The Flex components are probably the nicest touch with interactions being quite intuitive. The demo itself is minimal, but you can easily see how future iterations of the technology could lead to a compelling user experience, both with corporate applications and 3rd person gaming.
What would be nice to see is a 2D minimap so people can navigate to any position regardless of where the camera is. This would also assist the user when the map is more complex than the circular arena seen in the demo. One step further could be to duplicate this interactive map on one of the surfaces! Defeating the purpose, I know, but it would illustrate the versatility of the engine. It would also be cool to see Timmy with an interactive actions menu - something similar to that seen in Little Big Planet.
Otherwise, all they need to do now is hook up a Wiimote and sell it to Google!
Read more at their blog: Outsmart
[via: The Flash Blog]
