davidpaulrosser{blog}

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.

Hi all!

It’s summer, I’ve just graduated and now I have some spare time whilst searching for a job to create the next version of dashboardX. I’m currently writing a design document for it. Here’s the feature list so far:

Features:

• Xbox Live player information (More information added)
• Customizable backgrounds
• Friends List (New)
• Recently played games with achievement information and tracking (More information added)
• Sleek dashboard interface (Still maintaining the feel of the 360′s)
• Possibly the ability to create your own themes?

Runtime:

• Desktop application / Adobe Air .air
• Web application / Flash .swf

Desktop version:

The desktop version would include all of those features. I’m thinking of an application size around 1000 pixels wide by 570 high. That way I can do more with the space. I was limited before by what I could display with the size of the first version.

Web version:

I was thinking of making the web version smaller with less features. The current gamercard’s available are essentially ‘signature’ size. So maybe matching their resolution but adding more features than the existing ones would make the web version more desirable for forums etc.

I’m open to all comments on this. I want to make this version more accessible than the first and hopefully more fun to use and interact with. Feel free to leave a comment, and il get back to you :)

*Please note I don’t have access to the full Xbox Live API so I wouldn’t be able to include functionality such as adding new friends/ messaging etc.