Too much tech is not enough

So far the year of 2010 has been quite an interesting one for us tech heads in the studio. A few thousand lines of code later, and we are still dreaming in as3 and php.

Getting Technical

Some of the challenges we have tackled so far include; continuing our dabbling with augmented reality , diving deeper into flash and experimenting with 3D and its ability to take flash to the next level , and getting up close and personal with the ever changing beasty called SEO (the optimising of Google - and similar - indexing of site content).

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality defines the means of a live direct or indirect view of the physical real world environment whose elements are augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery - meaning that information is collected about the users environment (usually with a video camera or similar) and digital computer imagery is layered in amongst it to appear as if it actually exists in the user’s world even though it is purely computer generated.

Imagine those old pop-up children books but instead of the paper “magically” creating a scene on the pages of the book, with augmented reality the computer places the 3D scene on the book by identifying distinct details on the pages of the book.

There are indeed many forms of Augmented reality and it is being used for more and more things as the technology matures. It seems that people’s fascination with being on TV is carried over to the net.

If you want to find out how we implemented one form of augmented reality, check out Aldrich’s wacky explanations on the subject and see what we did for our Christmas card.
Check it out

There are several other more ambitious augmented reality projects in the works, but they are all top secret … for now!

Taking Flash into 3D

Through our endeavours of augmented reality, we got back into deploying flash applications with the use of three dimensional (3D) objects, enriching the users experience.

3D in flash is not a true form of 3D - in the sense of a hardware accelerated computer game - rather an attempt to create 3D perspective and depth within a 2D environment.

It works by drawing 2D triangles which are ordered by a relative z-depth value, which in turn is used to establish a layered display system so that objects that should appear in the background are prevented from being displayed in front of foreground elements.

Box wants to go 3D!

Some major draw backs to using 3D in flash include:

• Performance - which limits how complex a scene can get before the frame rate becomes an issue.
• Inaccurate z-depth sorting - the faux z-depth 2D layer system requires objects to have smaller triangles in order to prevent object meshes from being drawn incorrectly on top of each other.
• Filtering of texture images (the standard 3D rendering practice of mipmaps is largely impractical in the flash 3D due to performance issues - mipmaps are precomputed reduced resolution version of the texture image.)

An example of the 3D implementation within flash is a website that AWS is developing for JAWSARCHITECTS. The typographically-centric website has a 3D menu system that would be extremely hard to achieve with html and java.

Screen shot of the Jaws Architects site

To see the end result, check out the live site at:
http://www.jawsarchitects.com.

As a lot of the work in the studio is of a 3D animation origin, it is an increasingly exciting time as we continue to push our 3D expertise into the interactive environment of the web … rumours are circulating that the AWF website is going to have a major 3D overhaul … but then I won’t recommend listening to rumours

SEO and Google Indexing

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of driving quality internet traffic to a website and improving the volume of website linking and search engine rankings.

What this means is through the use of various procedures, you are able to receive improved search results for your websites through the various search engines available to users and increase your site’s indexed rankings (higher up on the list of search results).

Visual illustration between a non SEO site and a SEO site

There are a multitude of various strategies for SEO.

And you thought you were going to gets some secret tips! … as if we would give away the knowledge gained though our own blood, sweat and tears…

… Okay then, here is one consideration to remember (probably the most important factor) ….

Content is King!

Content leads to indexable meta data, content leads to crosslinks and link backs, content leads to a web that is engaging and enjoyable.

Stay tuned for more fascinating projects and technical developments.