Jason T Clark.net

So, if you’re an IBMer, and you’re in the know about IBM’s Hackday events, you’d know that the results were recently posted.  And the winner in the Virtual Worlds/Augmented reality category was none other than my Project WiiSpark application.  Thanks to Peter Yim, my colleague, for all of his work contributing to the project.  And, thanks to all those who voted.  Since this is an internal IBM event, there’s not much I can show about the other winners.   However, we here at IBM developerWorks are planning to to a full-on YouTube video explaining the app, and the technologies used to pull it off.

Again, thanks to everyone for participating!

Here’s a nicely written article on Gamedev.net on the ElectroServer product by Electrotank.  Electrotank is known for their ElectroServer product, which powers the ever popular Webkinz MMO for kids.  If you’re any ways interested in persistent-worlds development using technologies like flash, check it out.

The above video is a small screencast of my IBM WiiSpark application. This is the application that I created, using ActionScript3, Papervision3d, and the WiiFlash API. As you can see, it starts out as a rotating cube, but after entering in a keyword search, it goes out and retrieves thumbnail pages of the search results from IBM developerWorks. I figured since I work for them, I’d try to make this sample application relevant (*smile*).

You can’t see this on the video itself, but the movement of the cube is being controlled by a Wiimote that is connected to my PC via Bluetooth, which gives us a pretty good inidication that the Wiimote can certainly be used as an alternative input device. I’m sure you may have seen many other Wiimote device applications, and this was just my entry into the “sweepstakes”.

Maybe this is useful from a broader perspective though- should I open source this code? Leave me a comment, and let me know what you think.

Oh one last note, I ended up entering this application in as my entry for IBM’s Hackday event last month.  Haven’t heard about any results from that event, but I’ll keep you posted!

OK so, there’s this thing at IBM where a bunch of coders get to together around the world on one day and come up with something novel and new to create- it’s called IBM Hackday.

Peter Yim, my co-worker from the not-so-infamous Wii Headtracking at IBM developerworks YouTube videos, decided that we were going to participate in HackDay this year. He came over, we put on a pot of coffee, and we started Hacking away. We created a AS3 application that utilizes WiiFlash and Papervision3d. Hopefully in a few days, we will be able to showcase it here. Stay tuned.

OK, so you guys get to see me in rare form. My team and I decided to do a few “geeky” videos about our experiences with the Nintendo Wiimote, and a little program called WiiFlash.

Check it out:

We are just getting started with our foray into doing “geeky” videos for YouTube, but if you’d like to see more, head over to http://www.youtube.com/developerworks.

Over the last month or so, I’ve been wondering from an implementation perspective if Flash is a viable virtual worlds solution. I’ve said to my colleagues that in some cases, a web based world would be a nice fit, depending on what that world was trying to accomplish. There’s a somewhat infamous discussion as it relates to virtual world implementations, augmentation vs. immersion-to simply “augment” the web with the elements of a virtual world, or to immerse your audience within a world.

From reading this discussion, I began to explore ways that I might be able to “augment” our current web presence. Many problems that arise from the immersion approach that takes the audience to a new “location” stem from attempting to bring artifacts of the traditional web along with you. In addition, when a virtual world is accessed from the traditional “thick client” application, the issues with downloading, cross-platform support, and updates management comes to play.

Can we simply use the web to access and interact with virtual worlds? Well, isn’t that what Webkinz is? What about Club Penguin? Although these environments have a youthful audience in mind, still the function is the same. So, I began to look at Flash, since it seems to provide the richest web-based content that could possibly do the job.

I felt like such a newbie when it came to learning all about Flash, because there is a plethora of information, tools, tutorials, videos, and etc on creating Flash applications. And Actionscript, Wow! There’s tons of stuff out there about learning Actionscript and leveraging tools to do the job. One of the first things I decided to do with AS3 was to learn a 3D Gaming Engine built on AS3. There are 4 major projects for this type of work:

• Alternativa3d
• Papervision3d
• Sandy3d
• Away3d

I’ve also been playing around with FFilmation, the Isometric engine using AS3. There’s tons of stuff I could probably mention in this post, but just now that my attention is now slightly focused on how using these technologies can solve some of our problems with virtual worlds based on totally immersed environments. I’ll be catching us all up on some of the unique things that can be offered in this space.