Flying Over the Rocky Mountains Monday 2009-04-20
Ever since I first installed Google Earth, I’ve been fascinated by all the things you can do with it. You could live and travel on this virtual planet, and see places you’d never have chance to visit. It gets better all the time, with 3D houses in bigger towns, better satellite photos and lots of layers with information on places you go to.
I have experimented on a basic level with placing my own bookmarks and overlays, and by building simple houses to place where I live. You do this by constructing them in Google SketchUp. To get the right spot to place a building, you first import a piece of the globe into SketchUp, place your house on that piece of ground and export it back to GE. All information, such as your building, the latitude and longitude coordinates and images to use as texture, is saved in a ZIP archive whith the kmz extension.
When you import a piece of ground from GE into SketchUp, what you get is an image of the area you currently show on GE and a mesh carrying the height information.
I have messed around with SketchUp for few days, which was a lot of fun. The tool is very intuitive for the basic things, and for the more advanced, there are plenty of tutorials, many in form of excellent videos, to show you exactly how things are done. I thought it would be a good idea to cut away a piece of the Earth and try to import it to a Sandy application. That way I would have real terrain to play with in my Sandy projects.
I thought that a piece of the Rocky Mountains would be fun, so I started SketchUp, went to Google Earth and selected a piece of the Rockies, that looked nice, flew up to a suitable altitude. Then I got rid of most of the widgets in GE, to avoid click buttons in nature 
.
I imported that piece of ground into SketchUp, and made some manipulations to keep only the mesh and the satellite image. Then I saved the result as a kmz file, which I immediately unpacked to extract a COLLADA file and the image. The I converted the COLLADA file to a 3DS file, as I trust the 3DS parser in Sandy. I wrote a small application in Sandy, that imported and presented my claim in the Rocky Mountains.
The flight navigation is lousy, but you can rotate and tilt the piece of ground with the navigation keys, fly forwards and backwards with mouse drag, and zoom with the mouse wheel or Ctrl (aka Command) and Shift. Look what beautiful mountains. They rock!
Stockholm City Hall in Sandy Wednesday 2009-04-01
I have finally come to revisit the Golden Room of Stockholm city Hall in the new SkyBox of Sandy.
I made this as a demo of the SkyBox. Normally it is used for outside scenery as a backdrop for more interesting stuff in a game. Here the SkyBox texture in itself is the whole content. Some day I may place something inside the room – why not a Nobel Prize winner 
The Nobel Prize banquet takes place in the Blue Room in the same City Hall. Now click and enjoy the mosaic of 18 million glittering tiles of the room.
[Edit] There is a haXe version as well.
Sandy 3D Engine 3.1.1 Released Sunday 2009-03-29
After some weeks of cleaning up and bug hammering, the 3.1.1 version of the Sandy 3D Engine was released today. If 3D worlds in Flash and Actionscript is your cup of tea, go grab the latest Sandy, with API documentation. If you are a beginner in the Flash 3D space, there are lots of tutorials to get you started.
Image borrowed from “The Heart of Innovation” – You are what you drink
Living Positively with Coke and Sandy Friday 2009-03-27
Yippee
The multilingual Brazilian media firm Gringo developed the vivapositivamente site for Coke, and to the joy of the hard working developers of the Sandy3D team, they used Sandy to drive this fine and elaborate site.
The site was granted the FWA Site of the Day Award March 25 2009.
Go visit www.vivapositivamente.com.br/ and see what can be done with this eminent 3D engine.
AR is in the AIR Sunday 2009-03-22
This is a real beauty. AR is coming to the ART.
World Builder
Wow – FLAR is AR in Sandy Wednesday 2009-03-18
I’m excited! Augmented Reality (AR) has come to Sandy. AR is, as you may know, a technique to get an immersive experience. Computer animated things may seem to pop up in thin air before your eyes, almost like a hologram. The tools to accomplish this is a digital video camera and a programming toolkit called ARToolkit. The toolkit library was originally written in C, but has since been ported to Java and lately to Actionscript by Sakoosha. The Actionscript version is cleverly named FLARToolKit, and can be used to create computer vision for Flash.
Sandy FLAR
This is how it works: You film some environment with your camera and the program analyzes the image, frame by frame, in search for a predetermined simple maker pattern, for example a black square. From the perspective distortion of that square, the camera position and attitude in 3D space is calculated.
The camera used for the 3D virtual scene is moved to same position, and the resulting projection is overlaid on the video. The thrilling result is that the animated 3D objects are seen as hovering over the marker in the real scene. I found some really good experiments with this technique on the web, and I immediately wrote Makc the great, hinting that we need this for the Sandy 3D library. And, hast du mir gesehen, within a day he created a working Sandy FLARCamera for use with the FLARToolkit.
Google Friends Buzz Saturday 2009-03-14
What buzzes on the web today, or should I say since a couple of days ago, is the brand new Google Friend Connect API.
In hard competition with Facebook, Twitter and other popular social networking sites, Google has decided to make it easy for people to connect to friends over the web.
Google released the API in the expectation that developers will come up with fun and intelligent ways of connection people.
As sited from their presentation page, two primary goals are to
Make it easy for every site owner to add Friend Connect to their site, regardless of their technical capabilities. We do this by letting site owners simply paste snippets of code into their websites’ HTML to instantly provide social capabilities on their sites.
Be open by letting visitors control their own data and freely share it with sites and services as they see fit. Services that are currently integrated with Friend Connect include OpenID providers like Yahoo!, social network providers like Twitter, and update aggregators like Plaxo Pulse.
The API uses the OpenSocial standard and already clever programmers has made plugins for WordPress, Drupal, and phpBB.
Sandy 3D Engine Released Thursday 2009-03-05
Hi there! If you are an artist in Flash 3D, and if you dare programming a bit of Actionscript, this piece of news is for you. The versatile Sandy 3D Engine, Version 3.1 is now released. Since the emission of the last stable version of this 3D library, the 3.0.2 version, lots of work has been done to get the engine faster and simpler to use. Some good new features are added as well. The API hasn’t changed much, apart from the addition of new classes, so it should be easy to port your existing applications to use the new version. Sandy 3D Engine comes with full API documentation and lots of tutorials and examples.
You will find lots of demos and useful information on the Sandy site.
It also has a vivid and friendly forum, where you can ask all kinds of questions, related to the Sandy. Very often you’ll get the answer within a day, and you can discuss your application development and contribute your own experiences and solutions.
Go download this amazing library and start playing with 3D in Flash!
Mosnaps Goodbye Thursday 2009-02-26
We put a lot of work into that mobile image site, but it really didn’t catch on. Harish tried a variant with paying visitors and simplified the maintenance by restricting the mobile phones to BlackBerry only. After some time the project silently died. The site may still be there though.
Lots of work and a bright idea, but poor marketing, I guess.
Well S.H. and you always learn something
Syntax Highlighter Plugin
This is an experimental post, to test if the syntax highlighter plugin wp-synhighlight really works.
In my first attempt I just dropped the plugin into the plugins directory and here I’m going to add some Actionscript code:
[codesyntax lang="actionscript3"]public Class Nuts()
{
var none:NoOne;
// Initiate this class
public function Nuts()
{
none = new noOne();
}
}
[/codesyntax]
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