There are gender wars, and then there are casualties. It wasn’t until 2011 that the behemoth toymaker LEGO acknowledged girls’ desire to build with bricks, even though the company had long before made a seemingly effortless pivot to co-branding, video games, and major motion pictures. So it’s little wonder that girls face all-too-real obstacles when […]
Read moreBringing 3D images to life through animation.
Problem
You can’t adequately show a 3D object or scene on your web site.
Solution
Allow the visitor to rotate, spin, or navigate a 3D world on screen, using one of two techiniques:
- Pre-render. You can make a pre-recorded animation in the form of movie clip; use an interactive 3D object, such as Quicktime 3D; or make a 3D view in Flash.
- Real-time graphics. Simple polygons and images can be manipulated to seem 3D. Represent the objects using 3D points, manipulate them in 3D, and have a rendering engine for displaying on-screen.
Discussion
Most three-dimensional objects come to life when animated on-screen. The illusion of three dimensions is captivating, and visitors will enjoy the virtual reality experience. It is more interesting to navigate a scene or rotate an object, than to simply see a few selected views.
Pre-rendering allows you to have highly ornate images, but since you need a frame for every view, file sizes quickly balloon. Real-time graphics can result in smoother motion, and also allow more interactivity and degrees of motion. The Virtual Human project from the mid 1990s explored building dynamic query and previewing techniques for rendering voxel images of a human. The visitor was able to view portions of the human anatomy, and to choose the angle from which to view it. By pre-rendering many views, the system was able to send to the viewer only the relevant information, downloading a small sample of the full dataset; larger selections of the areas of interest to the visitor could then be downloaded.