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:
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…
