Hi Away3Ders,

So I want to start a discussion about website design taken into true 3D form. Googling “3D website” brings up some fairly interesting examples of “3D websites” but in reality they aren’t true 3D but rather are regular 2D sites with 3D elements. There are a few examples out there that are true 3D where there’s a 1st person point of view “walking around” inside a building and clicking on images on walls to navigate. That’s OK, but leaves me thinking what other kinds of interesting things can be done. Flash sites got a bad rap when the whole “Web 2.0” back-to-basics push happened which I thought was frankly boring. I understand why that happened since there were so many sites with Flash intro pages that took forever to load and had little to do with the actual function of the site. Now almost everyone has broadband and with good design we can get that eye-candy loaded fast. So I’m looking for ideas from the community here whether a paradigm shift into true 3D websites is possible with FP 11 and what form navigation might take in such sites?

Interesting I only saw this now.  3d sites happen to be what I am most interested in and is exactly what I am building with Away3d 4.0.  I am currently in the process of completely rebuilding my current website in 3d.  I included a design image of what I plan part of the interface of the new site to look like (rough-rough draft).

I’ve actually been in the “web 3d” scene since the VMRL days when I first began it while studying at UCLA.  Since then I have used Java 3d, Anark, Cult, the old and forgotten Adobe Atmosphere, Viewpoint Media Player, Shockwave3D, Papervision, and now finally Away3D.  It’s been a long journey to say the least.  I actually worked for Viewpoint for 9 years specializing in building 3d websites for them.

Yes, I think the time has definitely come to show what is truly possible with 3d websites.  I have the environment for my new site pretty much finished and “flythru-able” but no collision detection yet.  I’d be happy to share it with you, but I’m not ready to put a public link out yet.  Let me know if you’re interested.  Would be great to talk some more about this.

yeah websides in 3d.

some years ago, if i could have done it, i would have done anything in 3d instead of 2d.

this days i feel more like you should carefully consider what you should do in 3d and what not.

so i guess the best playground for this is of course 3d games.

i still now a lot of people who hatea 3d content showing up in websites, so i wouldnt use 3d for stuff like a online store.

i am planing on using flash3d for some profil websites for artists (musicbands/painters/....). for many of this projects i think i will use music-driven animation in my scenes a lot.

for scene navigation: i will do a lot of crazy stuff (use objects found in scenes to play music tracks, navigate through websites in cars,...) but i think there should allways be provided a easy to use 2d menu for website navigation, because thats what people are used to.

and what i definitly wanna do is to have 3d-meshes in lipsynch with songtexts. thats my main project . even planning on building application thats creating this lipsynch-animations and exports it over to c4d for use in c4d-rendering.
but that is still a long way to go…..

I agree on the easy 2d nav point - a lesson I learned after designing many 3d sites.  The users who aren’t used to a game-style 3d navigation scheme want a quick and easy way to get right to the info they are looking for.  In the screenshot I attached in my previous post you can see a drop down menu in the to left corner called “jump to”.  This will be a menu of pre-selected camera positions for users to quickly get from one point of interest to another.  It will tween the camera along a preset path from one position to another.  In this way, users can still get to their desired info quickly easily like they do on 2d sites, but they will still have the option to “unlock” the camera and walk around if they so choose.

thats exactly what i meant.

allways provide easy navigation

something i allways wanted to make (and propably will) is a 3dguestbook, where users can leave (spray) a comment on a wall in a 3d-scene.
here i would use a 2d overlayed menu to zoom on choosen comment in scene.

That sounds cool!  Would love to see that!

hey cb, thanks for kicking off the discussion. Sounds like you have been a pioneer of 3D web. So yeah I definitely agree with the dual navigation arrangement so that people who don’t want to explore the 3D have that option. Since it is so easy to get 3D into browsers with Away3D I think we’ll be seeing a lot more exploration into what’s possible for 3D website design. The interesting thing will be to see if a “standard” of some sort emerges for 3D nav just as it did for 2D. I can foresee motion graphic elements becoming important as well as the line between television content and web content continues to be blurred. It will also be interesting to see what kind of backlash ensues in response to 3D being used more and more in web design.

80prozent, that would be way cool. Why not expand it into a whole 3D graffiti/tagger environment? Spray paint anything you want without the possibility of getting arrested

i even thought about mergeing this into a game where users can also choose to be a graf-hater / cop and bust other users while spraying.

finally it looks like away3d makes all my crazy visions come true.

Been busy working away on a virtual DVD store for some time now - click the TV logo in the top left to have a look:

http://videoemporium.co.uk

That’s the previous pv3d version, gradually getting the FP11 version up the the same functionality.

Click and drag to look around, click on a DVD to go and look..

hey, this topic is excactly what i was thinking about a few years ago…how would it be navigating in a full 3d website. I guess most people think of walking around…. you can also think on flying (with physics)....but please discreet. Don´t overdose it.

I decided to rotate and also zoom. It was important to give the user all important navigation without searching for stuff in 3d space. a pity that i couldnt finalize it. I wanted an extra on the back of the website…so in the back of the tv.

Sorry for the long intro! When i watch it now (after more than 2 years), i would love to have a skip button

http://www.mischen-impossible.de

Here’s a couple of threads where I talk about a feature we could really use in Away4 to help support 3D Website/Interface work:  if we could somehow get a feature similar to “OwnSession” and render layers like we once had in Away3.  I know it’s more of a a challenge with Stage 3D.

http://away3d.com/forum/viewthread/608/#1855

https://github.com/away3d/away3d-core-fp11/issues/71#issuecomment-1978501