..it’s time to get to experimenting with Augmented Reality. In my case, “experimenting” means learning.
I got jazzed up about the AR business card last summer and started pondering on the other possibilities of AR…some of which I wish not to disclose though it’s not likely that they haven’t been done already, but these days, you never know.
So, I will be reporting back on what I find.
I finally made my first effort at checking out Flex builder. I played around with it as I was through a Flex tutorial on gotoAndLearn.com. Now, what I loved about it was not only the simplicity in visually building an application but I also loved how the application populates the code in the MXML. Very slick. Of course, it’s AS3 based and I’m still working on learning that, but I’m anxious to add it to my skill sets.
I’ve actually pondered on leaving AS2 in the past and just pushing my self-education in the area of AS3. The fundamentals are basically the same and you can still code on the main timeline (not on the MCs or buttons, mind you)….but you also have the ability to take the Flash applications up a notch by building the code strictly in external files. With that idea in mind, you’re seriously creating the most basic “shell” file possible..no content within whatsoever…just a reference to external code which handles everything.
Slick.
A couple of years back, I had interviewed with a banner add vendor in Atlanta called EyeWonder. When I sat and met with the manager who was doing the hiring, I learned about how far things had gone with banner ads. Really, I ignored them back then. Never really interacted with them because they all did the same thing…or so I thought. What I had learned was that many of the rich media ads that were being produced were more like micro-sites with all the content, video, forms, multiple pages, etc.
Fast forward to when I started at Moxie (I just had a two year anniversary, btw) and I’m essentially doing these rich media ads but only recently did I get a prime example of a banner add that was built like a micro-site. In all, I built out six files:
I used a preload class to load all files into my shell and used TweenLite to auto-alpha the content to 0% until the navigation system in the shell was interacted with. At that point, when a button as interacted with, flash makes the content visible with aut0-alpha at 100% and loads it into the empty movieclip.
I used TweenLite for 99% of the animation in this placement and in the end it looked pretty amazing. We were all really happy with the end result. Good project worthy of going into my portfolio.