Shade

Outdoor Panoramic scene where the user collects samples

Over the last 5 weeks I had the wonderful opportunity to work with a Designer I have also had tremendous respect for : Kevin Whitefield ( site is located at : virtualmatter.org ) . Our goal was to create an online experience that that was truly immersive. We used flash technology and create several scenes the user could navigate and interact with very similar to Quicktime’s QTVR technology.

At first we toyed with the idea of using papervision3D but realized that it was not as feasible as we first thought, even though projected environments on spheres did correct a lot of the distortion problems caused by large panoramic images.

This project was also a great opportunity to create complex soundscapes which I had a blast creating, and was thankful I allocated enough time to do it well.

This is just the first polished version as of right now but a new and improved version is already in the work to improve a users sense of purpose , and explain the interactions better for less tech-savy users. Overall though this project was a great experience in collaborating with a designer.

I used Gaia Framework ( gaiaflashframework.com ) for the site and ran into some interesting problems with detecting mouseEvents while scrolling around a panorama. I ended developing this entire system that fake mouseEvents and used Point.distance( ) between the mouse’s position and the hotspots position and comparing that to the width of the hotspot.

Below are some screenshots taken at various instances in our storyline, but that really doesn’t do it justice.

Head over to http://shadeAdventure.org to checkout our site, and please : turn up your volume.