Anaara Media LLC » Away3D

Web 4.0?!? GE leverages Flash player in a whole new way with the FlarToolKit

Fuad Kamal — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:52:03 +0000

I saw this tweet by crashmedia and was totally blown away by this video demo showing an implementation of FlarToolKit:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkqtklABgGQ

The demo is by Robert Cooper, creative director of some company (couldn’t quite make out the name from the video, guys that would have been a great plug for your company even though you had nothing to do with creating it) and the technology is the ‘GE Plugin for Smartgrid.com’ according to him. I wanted to play with this for myself so I went to SmartGrid.com but didn’t find anything about a 3D plugin or the demo, so after a bit of googling around I finally found it here.

(updated to force aggregation on MXNA)

You print out a piece of paper according to the instructions, hold it up to your web cam, and on your screen it becomes an impressive interactive 3D model you can manipulate with the paper in your hand. Very, very cool. Kudos to the team behind this, whoever you are. Apparently they created it with the FlarToolKit. FlarToolKit is an AS3 library based on ARToolKit / NyARToolKit I wish GE would have credited the agency who designed and implemented this, or even let us know if it was an internal team. I don’t think it takes away from their brand identity, rather it would strengthen it by showing they care about the team(s) behind their presence.

Update: the video above was removed, but here’s another one on YouTube demonstrating the GE AR demo:

Anaara.com just went LIVE

Fuad Kamal — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 23:01:07 +0000

Well this has been a month of new things being implemented; Barack Hussein Obama won the presidential election, Adobe MAX SF is around the corner, and our web site is finally live! For ages now we have only had our blog on the site; our workload has been such that getting a decent site together has been beyond scope…but a little over a month ago we finally put our collective feet down and declared, enough is enough! Developed with Adobe Flex, of course…enjoy!

Lots of thanks to everyone who participated in the alpha release.

We decided to deploy in phases…so stay tuned for lots to come still.

Mazda 6 Minisite uses Flex, Papervision

Fuad Kamal — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 17:36:23 +0000

Featured on The FWA, this new mini-site for the 2009 Mazda 6 delivers a pretty cool user experience. I particularly liked the transitions when you switch the color of the car (see ‘room 2′), reminiscent of a certain Nissan commercial (Maxima or Altima? can’t remember…) where as the car accelerated, the paint peels away to reveal another color. As I began to navigate through the site, I suspected that they were using papervision – it just had that feel. Then when I got this telltale debug error window, the cat was out of the bag – they are using both Flex and Papervision (papervision is clear from the error, what is less obvious, is that flex was used – before the error popped up the standard blank flex loading page had come up). Overall a great site, and regarding the error, now that we have started rolling up our own papervision sleeves for an online gaming project…well lets just say its a bit involved.

I have to wonder though, as we begin to invest in Papervision, how the native 3D capabilities of Flash Player 10 are going to change the landscape for technologies such as PaperVision and Away3D once FP10 is released? There are sessions on Pixel Bender at the upcoming MAX (look for us there…more on that later!) conference, a technology which has been brought from After Effects into FP10 for image processing…