davidpaulrosser{blog}

In May 2010 I entered the 2010 Adobe Design Achievement Awards, an awards scheme setup that recognises and showcases the excellent use of Adobe software throughout the creative industry. Students from higher education institutes, globally are eligible to enter the contest.

At that moment in time I had just finished my final exam project at Brighton University. I created an Interactive education package called Galileo. Below are the pieces I submitted along with my entry for the Application Development category:

On the 23rd August Adobe notified all semifinalists, including myself. Unfortunately my entry did’t make the finals. Although they sent me a nice certificate with my semifinalist status as you can see at the top of this post.

To learn more about Galileo and how I came up with the idea click here.

I’ve just launched a small little web application I’ve been working on for the past week. As you can guess from the blog post title it’s an (deep breath) anaglyph stereoscopic 3D drawing application. If you want to play around with the app straight away click the pirate below:

The idea

During my second year at Bath Spa University we had a self directed project. I set my project on illusions. Through my research I was looking at techniques and illusions that trick the mind, this led to Stereoscopy. I was in Brighton sometime after browsing through the lanes and came across a 3D Drawing paper pad in some shop, identical to the one below:

Since then my 3D drawing pad went walkies :/.
From a recent trip to the National Science Museum I found another in their shop, so I grabbed another and thought it would be a cool little project to re-create in Flash.
As I didn’t have any previous knowledge of Bitmap programming in Flash it proved a challenging and exciting project to develop.

Development

I was originally going to develop this app with the PureMVC framework, that way I would have learned two new things at once. After reading and following some basic setup tutorials I decided not to go with the framework, the prime reason being I don’t know it well enough to build something that could turn out to be quite complex. Instead I wrote a little class library to manage the application.

For the drawing techniques in Draw3D I extended the functionality of Colin Moock’s Scribble as3 example in the O’Reilly Book: Essential ActionScript 3.0 by Colin Moock. If you don’t have that book and your starting out in AS3 I highly recommend it, as it’s not just a book, its a great reference to refer too, and a million times better than the Adobe Live docs!

I used Flash Develop along with the Flex SDK to produce the application. All graphics in the app are created entirely from AS. The only bitmaps in there are ones I’ve converted to from vector.

I’l probably write a blog post sometime in the foreseeable future on tips and tricks with Bitmap programming as I’ve learnt quite a few in the process of developing this app. If you didn’t click on the pirate above click here, grab your 3D glasses and doodle something.