After over a year of not listening to my nagging collegua (Away3D-team member Fabrice Closier) telling me to start working with (Away)3D, I caved…
I started to experiment a little in Away3D and turned my 2D jellyfish experiment into a 3D version. You can watch the result here: http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp080603.htm

I added a couple of tricks I learned way back when I created levels for Unreal Tournament.
For example I added a second viewport for the skybox (in this case a sphere), because the Away3D Skybox-class is in fact not a real skybox but just a really huge cube rendered in the same viewport as the rest of the scene.
The camera in my skybox viewport points in the same direction as the camera in the main viewport but always stays at point (0,0,0). This way the camera will never approach the side of the skybox, giving the illusion that everything in this viewport is really far away.

All-in-all a good start in Away3D if you ask me. I hope to do some real projects with 3D in the comming weeks…

Photosynth

It’s a program which allows you to take a bunch of photos from some place and create a 3D-scenery without any sweat. It’s just some alpha version so you can’t use your own photo’s, but it’s still really exciting to view the examples they’ve got on their site (see “try it” (need to install a pc-only plug-in)).

Go check it out:
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/default.html

Here are some explanatory videos:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=220870

*) If you already heard of it, don’t blame me for posting it just now, but blame yourself for not telling me about it