I'm very delighted to finally announce that I have been working on the first Papervision3D book that will be released ever. The book is in cooperation with my good friend and co-author Jeff Winder and will be published by Packt Publishing. Since the beginning of this year we have been working extremely hard on the writing of this book. We are ready with the writing of all chapters and are preparing all final drafts right now. So you can expect this book to be published really soon.

The result of our hard work is that we have a book that will be useful for both experienced as non-experienced Papervision3D users. The first few chapters take no knowledge for granted and guides the reader through all steps for getting started with Papervision3D. It describes how to get Flash CS3, Flash CS4, Flex Builder and Flash Builder correctly configured for running Papervision3D code. This includes downloading Papervision3D (SWC, ZIP and a step-by-step guide for downloading from SVN). Once an example project has been compiled, a short introduction to OOP and classes is given for those who have no experience in this. From there the reader book gradually works through more advanced topics, such as loading external models, shading, z-sorting, viewport layers, particles, filters and effects, vector drawing and performance optimizations.

As the book contains much information on a variety of topics it is also interesting for those who already have experience in Papervision3D, but want to extend their knowledge and understanding. It was not aimed to be a reference guide, however it turns out that many topics are thoroughly described and can be used for this purpose as well. (I personally already did this while working on commercial projects that make use of Papervision3D)

Today the book has been announced on the website of our publisher, Packt Publishing and will soon be announced on other websites, like Amazon for example. For both Jeff and myself this is the first book we have ever written. Seeing our book and names listed is already very exciting.

We can't wait to have our book finished and hold the final copy in our hands. We did our best (and still do) to make this a very good book and we are looking forward to hear responses from our readers.  But for now we will continue writing on the last bits. Once there's more news about the exact release date I will post it here on my blog.

[Update 2009-07-29] Papervision3D Essentials - Now listed on Amazon

Tags: Actionscript, Books, Flex, General, Papervision3D, Tutorial by Paul Tondeur
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Last Thursday a new campaign for Volkswagen went live, which makes use of mobile streaming. I did some work for this in cooperation with Achtung!, before looking at what I developed for this campaign let me first give a nutshell introduction.

A new Volkswagen Polo is driving around in the Netherlands. When you see the car passing by, you can wave at the car, so the current driver has to stop and the new driver can continue the ride. Each day winner who drove the longest distance gets a ticket for the finale that takes place after the campaign. The one who wins the finale will win the car.

Visitors of the website www.pakdepolo.nl can see where the car is at this moment through several video streams and live GPS. You can leave your zip code on the website in to vote for your neighborhood, which could result in sending the car in that direction. The car is equipped with an custom written navigation system making use of Google maps and is in connection with the website. New routes can be pushed to the car. It is also possible to leave your mobile phone number or e-mail, in order to get a warning when the car is will cross your neighborhood.
I was asked to equip the car with all the technical stuff, as I have quite some experience with mobile streaming and equipping cars with it.

I had to:

• Recreate and assemble the camera system.
• Set up streaming to a Wowza server.
• Real-time push GPS positions from the car to all clients over a RTMP (Red5) connection
• Track distance per driver. (This was a real hassle, as the GPS devices which I’ve used gave unreliable positions once in a while)
• Create a LED display showing a driven distance per driver. (This was custom made. A Phidget has been used as the interface between a laptop and the LED display).
• Set up a local in-car network to set up a remote desktop between the laptop in front of the car, with laptops in the trunk.
• Custom build all hardware in the car.

The following images show some parts of my work: (more...)

Tags: General, Mobile streaming, Red5 by Paul Tondeur
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