O’Reilly: Inside RIA

The basic explanation of Augmented Reality is to superimpose graphics over real-world environments in realtime. In Flash, this is usually done with a webcam and a marker card. When you hold the card up to the webcam, Flash is able to detect the orientation of the marker and superimpose, in this case, a 3d model on top of it. This technology has been around for a while now and having access to it in Flash is really exciting. Although it is still in its infancy, over time the speed and power of AR will improve to hopefully play an important role in how we view the web. Now is a great time to get your feet wet in order to get a better understanding on how it works.

Here's a fun post that I've wanted to do for a while, but just haven't had the time until recently. I'm very interested in working with geographic data, 3D, and data visualization. This post is the first of what I hope to be several, where I will combine these interests and create an interactive 3D globe that you can recreate for your own purposes.

If you’re anything like me, you remember how excited you were years ago when you first wrote a simple line of code, ball._x++, in an onEnterFrame event and gleefully watched a ball fly across the stage. I promise you that little moving ball ain’t got nothin’ on what you’re about to learn here.

I was checking out the PaperVision3D blog today, and stumbled across a really impressive data visualization technique used by the band Radiohead with the release of their new video for "House of Cards". Why is this on insideria.com, you may wonder? Read on to see...

Since diving back into PaperVision3D in my last post, I've been having some fun playing with 3D concepts. I forgot how cool 3D visualizations can be, but at the same time, they can get really confusing and really complicated very quickly. At the same time as they are getting complicated and confusing, they also start creating abstract shapes that are intriguing.

I haven't touched PaperVision3D in a while, and some of the recent articles here on insideria.com motivated me to dive in and take a look around. Here's what I came up with after sitting down with it for an evening...

Materials
Why do you need to learn about materials in Papervision3D? Take a sphere for example: How do you determine whether the sphere is a globe, an eye, or a basketball? You only know by which material is mapped to the sphere.

This article will cover the basics of the materials available through Papervision3D and teach you how to add materials to Planes. Let's get started, we’ve got a lot of “material” to cover:

Papervision3D opens a whole new dimension to World Wide Web. The third dimension! Thanks to a core group of ActionScript geniuses who understand mathematical representations of 3D space way better than you or me, we can now easily add a new perspective to our Flash applications. This article will cover what’s necessary to set up your first Papervision3D application as well as introduce you to adding 3D objects. Put on your 3-dimensional hat and let’s get started!