FLASH: fyi: realtime 3D on the web, finally?

[John Dowdell]

Michael beat me to the punch with the news, but I hope you'll all take some

time to examine the implications of today's announcement... the Shockwave

Player has built-in auto-update, and already covers about half the consumer

web audience. There has never been a widely-deployed realtime 3D renderer

before... it's a historic moment.


(How does this differ from 3D in SWF? The Flash Player can use pre-rendered

3D objects, in either vector or pixel representations, and apply 2D sprite

animation techniques to them. A full 3D renderer takes vector descriptions

*of the objects* and generates views of them on demand, along with camera

moves, lighting moves, more. These are radically different sets of

abilities.)


The marketing focus is on games and commerce, sure enough, but for me, one

of the key things is integrating this realtime rendering with realtime data

feeds... you can pull in numbers from anywhere on the net, plug them into

your scene, and run the simulation... explore the data from various camera

positions... modulate the data to reveal hidden patterns. The tool renders

it all for you, multiple times each second... you just supply the scene

description. For data-visualization alone this should be a significant

innovation.


Anyway, I know there's a lot of interest in 3D renderings here, and also in

web deployment... if you see ways that your work can benefit from

rendering-on-demand, then keeping this Shockwave 3D news on your personal

radar may be very valuable.



(Caveat: This first version of realtime 3D in Shockwave is *very*

script-intensive... there's not yet a GUI approach to it, you'd absolutely

need to know the theory in order to script it. Future versions should

change this, but right now you'd need to be very comfortable scripting to

control the view into the scene, the objects in the scene, and the

rendering of this data.)



jd







John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US

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