LifeBox

As a professional Flash developer, I would be remiss if I did not join the great parade of bloggers doing the Papervision3D is here dance. I’ve had my eye on this for some time now - like everyone else - and it’s pretty exciting to see a project of this magnitude looking so good, and releasing their code under a generous open source license. I’ve done some 3D work in Flash before - it can get hairy, but these guys have put together something pretty solid, with the performance and features that you’d expect from a commercial product. I remember when they added 3D support to Macromedia Director - it was pretty freaking cool, and we did some neat work with it, but at the time (and still, I think), the adoption rate of the Director plugin on the web wasn’t so great, and nobody was going to use a scripted environment to deliver 3D on other media. Flash, even Flash 9, has a totally decent penetration these days - see the video player on MySpace, with its mumble millions of users - and the Actionscript coding APIs for the Papervision3D stuff look straightforward enough that pretty much anyone who’s done any coding in Flash can put together something that looks super sweet. I’m quite eager to see what comes out of this, and just hope that my clients can give me a little bit of breathing room before they expect me to make everything all zoomy and twirly, too. Yay, the future!