The folks over at blitz and at papervision2 have come up with some interesting ways to actually have real interaction with the MovieClips you are texturing your models with.

The quick is that you always use MovieMaterials(created with a reference to an existing movieclip someplace on stage). Normally the MovieMaterial object can be offstage or even visible=false to not see the clip; thing is they use visible=true, alpha=0 and reposition the clip actually under the mouse. A bit of trickery has the user actually interacting with the 2d flat MovieMaterial.

One of the nice things about this is that you can also do some testing and creating of functionality of your MovieClips as flat 2d objects and then map them to another object.

In creating an app with multiple panels in a 3D space every panel needs to be attached to the stage and then used to map onto your objects. This is fine when its just one object. When there are multiple surfaces that need interactivity this can quickly get out of control.

If you are using puremvc or caringorn to build your app you are used to creating a view/ui class that represents the specific element as a whole, it needs to have two elements, the stage texture version and the display3d object.

Ok cool. Just take a step back so that your view consists of two ui elements. Your mediators/viewhelpers can then access both elements and update them appropriately.

Wait what if we have multiple panels with the same textures? Looks like there are two options.

1. Use the same texture/ the same reference to the movieclip on stage and use the target of the object to figure out what object you are on(requires dynamic naming of the display objects you are using so they can be keyed in later to access the specific class). You can take advantage of the InteractiveEvent3D event which includes the DisplayObject3D element that is interacted with.
2. Use a separate instance of each texture on the stage so that it can be targeted separately for each individual item. This also needs to be dynamically named so that they do not overwrite any other textures. Destroy methods then need to make sure they clean up these 2d objects in addition to the 3d counterparts.

I also found that its a good idea to add some code that listens for the mouse to be off the given object and send the stage texture off stage and hidden. The example from blitz I found I could still click on an element even though my mouse wasn’t on the object.

Thanks to those guys for the hook ups of the advanced interactive elements.

If you are interested in adding papervision3d to your project like me you’ll find that there is a little missing in the documentation. Why because they are sooo active in making improvements its hard to keep valid documentation up to date. (At a recent conference I heard there is a book slated to be worked on when the new version of pv3d comes out for flash player 10)

Ok, so the documentation is sometimes a little sketchy, or a little old, or nonexistant. How do you get help? Sign up for the papervision newsletter. I’d select the daily digest that compacts the emails into larger emails that have multiple responses. Make sure you have plenty of inbox space and a filter to folder it because man it gets a lot of traffic. I feel a bit silly asking a question I’m sure has been asked before and generating even more traffic through everyone’s inboxes. I find that this little tip very handy.

Thanks to google you can use the site specific search function to limit your search to just the papervision archive. You can also use this to same search syntax to perform sub searches of any domain. Those google guys are always thinking(of course this has been around for quite some time).

I have a bookmark to this specific google query
that starts me out searching the entire archive. Then I just add on additional elements in the search box, space delimited of course, and I’m off and running. No more sifting though pages and pages of countless papervision digests of emails.

This is some pretty interesting datavis over time. From where else? TED of course.

gapminder/

Jott allows a vocal interface to a service that converts voice to text. Using this service you can do things like perform queries, setup notes/reminders, email people, blog; all from your phone. I saw someone else had used this on their blog and it seemed cool, a little odd that you could hear what they said.

jott/

Interesting little air app for automating the creation of vo classes in as3.

Value-object-creator

The presentation on the Adobe Media Player (AMP) was pretty hot. It may not sound exciting, yey another media player. Well this could change the way media is delivered. When 134 million internet users watch over 9 billion videos, and these people compose around 75% of the US population you can see the impact of these numbers. That puts an average of 181 minutes(over 3 hours) in an average of 68 clips per month. People are not watching long videos, probably around 3-5 minutes each. That is a huge chance for content owners to deliver their media. Its big (the numbers above were gathered by the com score July 2007 report).

People are changing the way they watch video. They are bringing it into their world on their timeline. Tivo and downloads allow viewers to skip advertising and watch it all on their own terms.

Here’s the low down.

AMP is AIR powered. Desktop hotness, that means its fueled with some mysql lite database power. It allows you to take your online resources offline.

What do the content lists look like? The content blocks are SMIL 2.1 format, so its not reinventing a new wheel, just expounding on an old one.

Does it support the playing local flv files? Sure does. Eventually I could see it supporting local playlists.

Does it support other encodings than flv? not at the moment. Seems like the new addition of the H.264 codec may make it in as AIR continues to

When’s it coming out? The adobe rep mentioned to watch for some announcements centered around the next MAX conference When its released its going to be an alpha release, and of course as AIR is still in beta, AIR will need to be flushed out fully before AMP moves to beta.

What kind of ads will it allow? Pre, post, and mid roll advertisements, multiple sizes of banners, and ads that can appear over the video. Yes, thats a ton of options for ad delivery. I’m hoping that providers wont over use these abilities. The ads will be able to be downloaded and cached for offline viewing. All the metrics from ad delivery is going to sync next time the viewer goes online. There’s also a full screen mode that will still take advantage of the ad delivery system, primarily delivering bug ads over the video, but potentially also banners. Its supposed to support time sensitive ads too, it someone is viewing a video offline and an ad expires because its a time sensitive ad, it will stop being delivered, no point in advertising for the super bowl after its over.

What about content integrity? They have encryption that allows encryption of ads and video streams to keep the video from being ripped off and uploaded to other sites. I’m sure its a matter of time before it gets hacked, but its better then is available now. It will also keep ads from being removed. The fact that this is included, sucks for viewers that simply don’t want to see ads, but in the end its the ads that are making possible “free” video. If broadcasters can be assured their viewers are getting ads, they will be more likely to deliver media this way. I don’t believe that Windows Media Player or Quicktime player currently support advertisements, so thats a huge thing thats going to drive content owners to AMP as a media delivery platform.

Live streaming? Eventually it will probably have abilities to pull down live feeds, but first release is only going to do so much.

Download to rent? Download to own? Not yet, but there are plans. There’s also word of a set top box bringing internet tv to the living room; a combatant to the apple tv box.

Closed captioning? Yups, I believe its using the new captioning component in flash 9 to deliver the captions. I’m not sure if you have to embed the captions in the video with time points, or if its externalized in an XML feed.

What kind of places are hooking up with AMP? Maven and brightcove are just two examples, from what I heard, large broadcasting companies are also on board, more news at MAX.

What’s it cost to use AMP? It costs the viewer nothing to download the player(once its available). It costs a content owner nothing if they don’t want to have ads, just use it to delivery content. Of course ad delivery and the content encryption are going to be services that people will pay for or servers they’ll need to own/leverage, most likely FMS 3.0 servers(probably more on the new release at MAX).

Who do I contact for more answers about all this? jen@adobe.com. She gave the presentation, but didn’t have the ability to share a ton. She did seem to hint that the MAX conference would potentially see additional information. More information to be available after AMP is available in alpha/beta.

One of the huge things that was amazing to see demo’d was the profiler element of flexbuilder. I’ve heard about it, read some postings, and have been playing around with it a tad. Its pure hotness.

The profiler lets you see at any point whats actually happening in your application. Variable and method stack. Everything currently in memory and a memory profile of the lifetime of your application. Its such a huge addition. I’m totally pumped to see what the improvements to the debugger have been made. If anyone’s used the flash debugger you know its been a pain in the past. I heard they were looking to make updates to the debugger. Just the addition of the profiler has been amazing.

Just had the Wednesday keynote with Kevin Lynch. Nothing gets you pumped up about flash than hearing about it from the source.

They discussed the massive improvements of the new flash player, the incorporation of the H.264 codec. Real HD video and hardware support.

They discussed the endeavors Adobe is taking to make everything opensourced.

Joshua Hirsch from Big Spaceship showed the HBO voyeur piece. It’s impressive, I’ve seen it before. but it was cool to hear about their implementation using papervision for the city scape. The loading strategy for all the video seems like it would be pretty intense, unless it was treated as one large video. (It ended up being a a single 56mb video, 5minutes)

They discussed the AIR platform and how bad-ass that is. Real-time editing of images, audio mixing, and output of those files. There was a cool streaming audio player and a real time document editor. I see one of the next things AIR developers are going to see as a headache are picking apart file formats, or coming up with their own formats for saving a production file. Saving out an mp3 or a jpg is hot, but you need to be able to come back and edit. Perhaps we’ll see the further emergence of open file standards. Seems like these are some examples, perhaps more real applications would utilize that kind of system. Some of the applications were previously unreleased.

I was reading the book “Getting Real” from 37 signals and saw a quote from the guys that made campaign monitor. It seems like a really cool application.

Recently I find myself in the midst of the question build or buy when it comes to client apps.
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