I am now deep into my IDAT312 project development, and I now have a 3D environment in which to work in. There is still a lot to do, but the basic space is working.
Current Twitter trends are imported into Flash using the Twitter API, and then an RSS parser does the job of matching up the more popular ones with descriptions from a different site. You can then click on a topic to navigate to it and eventually, read tweets concerning that topic.
More development to come…
Narrative and Digital form…what a module title! What does it entail; who knows? Anyway, we have been asked to create something to do with narratives/stories/perspective/digital-ness and such.
My first idea, as it turns out has already been done before. To read about it in more detail than I could explain, visit http://www.longestpoemintheworld.com/ and read a couple of lines.
Next, my second idea which has probably also been done before, but I couldn’t find any good sources to confirm this. We have all see tag clouds as part of this whole ‘Web 2.0′ thing. And yes, I do need the ”s because it doesn’t exist, but I shall save that for another rant.
Now it may have been a dream, or I may have seen it in a film, or some blog somewhere once, but I once saw a visualisation of what the Internet could eventually become. Rather than a 2D webpage-orientated layout with the traditional links, it was a 3D environment in which you could look around for ‘pages’, linked to one another by lines, allowing you to take a ‘journey’ through related topics. Some brain-dead web developers are affectionately calling this ‘Web 3.0′…come on, people!
A cursory glance through Google for 3D Internet gives a huge number of results from people who think that ‘Web 3.0′ is coming, but many fail to say how and why. Well it wasn’t a dream after all! The best quote I found regarding ‘Web 3.0′ (paraphrasing) was:
“It’s like Web 2.0, but 3-dimensional. It will be to Web 2.0 like the television was to the book…”
Needless to say, I don’t think this guy had a clue about the Internet.
One sort of spatial visualisation for the Internet is shown below, created by http://opte.org/.
My second idea was to create a ‘starfield’ of topics that you could navigate through and find related items, leading you through a number of current ‘stories’. I want to use something which has lots of UGC (User Generated Content) that was both diverse and recent. I came up with 3 potential candidates: BBC, Twitter and Facebook. Unfortunately, the Beeb doesn’t have an API to use and neither does FB, so Twitter it is.
Twitter has an API for all tweets and trending topics (popular things that people are currently talking about) which makes it a perfect choice.
You would be able to ‘fly’ though my 3D Twitter space, hovering over a star (or word, depending on how I implement it) to find out what it is. You can then click on the star to bring up tweets on that topic.
3D visualisations for web-based content are nothing new and for several years now, people have been trying to bring 3-dimensional environments to 2D displays. One particular piece of software I have always found quite impressive is PicLens, now re-branded as Cooliris. Cooliris used to be a plug-in for Firefox, but is now compatible with most browsers, because it is Flash-based.
Cooliris allows you to scroll along a seemingly endless 3D wall of news, photos, videos and search results. It is not the best for fast searching, but makes a great tool for casual browsers.
I hope my idea will be simple enough to implement by the deadline, but complex enough to create both a visually stunning app and a useful current-interest browsing tool.
Whist looking around for cool stuff to incorporate into our game, I stumbled across this. It’s a Flash movie that anaylyses the audio playing within itself and dynamically creates a spectral pattern. I would imagine that without much trouble, it could be modified to dynamically create a waveform of the pre-recorded audio. This would add a really cool effect to the game and give it the dazzling edge that it needs!
Kudos to the developer, Lee Brimelow.
However, looking even further, I found this. Another spectral anaylyser, but with more variations, including…A WAVEFORM! The developer, Antti Kupila (who has a great portfolio FYI) has also included the source files for download. WIN!
However, I believe that both of these cool effects are a direct result of AS3, and since we are still waiting for Adobe to get their ass in gear and give Orrin Flash 10 with AS3 on his phone, these effects may just have to wait. The other option is to fake the anaylyser like this.
HURRY UP ADOBE!