This is a follow-up of this.

Yeah well, I was more than optimistic to show those JS guys how fast Flash can be with the help of some brand new Adobe magic – but Pixel Bender was, unfortunately, quite disappointing:
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I was doing some stuff with 3D in Flash. And so I wondered wether sth similar might be achieved with pure HTML/Javascript. And yes, modern browsers (so not IE) can!

What I’ve done is this (a litte simplified):

• Migrated my 3D engine I’ve written years ago from AS1 to Javascript
• Extracted point cloud from Colada 3D object
• Draw rectangles for every point to canvas

And that’s how it looks:

Should work on Safari, Firefox and Opera.

I’m close to finishing a new project. Well, it’s actually not that new of a project, but it hasn’t gone online so far, and when I did the first version back in March I’ve used Papervision to achieve the goals. It’s basically a simple CoverFlow effect to scroll through Logos.

The thing with the old Papervision version was.. it got pretty slow when loading many pictures (resulting in many 3d objects). I got briefed with a screen design more or less and expected much less elements to be loaded. Now they got back to me saying they had some problems. Oh yes, they had. Boy was it slow!!

So I did a new version, skipping Papervision for the new Flash Player 10 capabilities. Wow! What an improvement not only in speed, but also in quality (because I wouldn’t have to switch to crispy bitmap handling for acceptable speed – and Flash doesn’t provide that feature anyway) and file size (less than 25%!). Now I just hope that the end client will have the nuts to go with Flash Player 10 :-) (Adobe still doesn’t provide any statistics, but it’s not that wide spread yet as for now).

See here the result (still in development – click the picture). You’ll need Flash Player 10 (I don’t check for the version in this example):

I made use of SimpleZSorter

Update: Well, the client wouldn’t go with 10. So I had to recode the Papervision version to speed it up as much as possible, and I think it got pretty speedy after all. See here for comparison.

A sweet nice canvas demo with some (pseudo?) 3D. A lot of code for a little story. But I like it. You’ll gonna need a fast computer ;)

It’s very cool and interesting to see that kind of things. Much progress has been made with this kind of multitouch interface, both from a technical and a user interface view. Things got much more responsive and start to make sense.. with that kind of data (especially data that’s hard to manage with keyboard). So, in my opinion, it’s a great replacement for most things that we do with the mouse… but hey, in a productive environement, we deal a lot with language input, don’t we?

And while a virtual keyboard on an iPhone makes sense (switching languages, improving functionality via sw update, not taking any space where not much space is), i’m less than sure that this would work on a desktop device. Sure, writing on a keyboard is nothing easy to learn, but once you have it, you can write much faster than by hand, and everybody who has to write a lot knows about the importance of some good tactile feedback.

Anyway, I’m more than interested where this will lead to. I’m pretty sure we’ll first see this kind of things in (productive) environments that have to deal with (3D) imagery (like in medicine). Hmm hmm.

It doesn’t happen that often that I see stuff that amazes me from a professional and private perspective in so many ways. Well, it happened today when I saw:

http://code.google.com/creative/radiohead/viewer.html (Flash)

http://code.google.com/creative/radiohead/ (see video in better quality, making of and more…)