Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

What did I do over the long weekend? Touring in the Forbidden City, literally. Last Friday, IBM launched the first Chinese 3D virtual tourism platform - Beyond Space and Time (The Virtual Forbidden City). In partnership with the Forbidden Palace Museum, IBM invested 3 years of time and over 3 million dollars to re-construct a 3 dimensional replica of the world largest Imperial Palace standing today, the Forbidden City of China. The Forbidden City was built from 1406 to 1420, consists of 980 surviving buildings with 8,707 bays of rooms and covers 720,000 square metres. It is also the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures in the world.

Similar to the Great Wall of China, Forbidden City has been the one of the "must see" tourism places in China. I have been there a dozen of times since age of 3. The Virtual Forbidden City enables visitors to interact with others and with a growing knowledge base of the historical site. Learning materials are being generated by tourists, volunteers, staff and data collecting scripts. As they explore the Virtual Forbidden City, visitors can choose to simply observe the buzz of activity, participate in activities that provide insights into important aspects of the Chinese history, or even take guided tours that uncover new insights into the stories of the Forbidden City. It's a combination of 3D Simulation and Machinima experience in my opinion. There are also a few mini-games embedded in the exotic gardens and amazing architectures to keep the audiences entertained.

Registration

To get started, go to the Registration Page to get an account and an avatar icon. This will allow you to save, share your virtual tourism experience with others. Your avatar can take the form of any of several people dressed in Qing era clothing.

Download and Start the Tour!

Upon the completion of the simple registration process, you will be lead to a page that allows you to download the software which will run the Virtual Forbidden City tour on your computer. Please note, you don't have to have an registered account, you may visit it as a guest after install the software.

The following are some photos taken by the virtual tourists and shared over the web. There are much more to it than a simple walk through. I encourage you to try out the platform yourself. It's free, and best yet, no advertisement attached to it "yet" (other than the IBM trademark everywhere of course). It's a really effective way to refresh your memory or give you a sneak preview of the amazing palace!

Actually, the title isn't really accurate, this is not 2.5D any more, it's really 2.8D in my opinion. One of the current project my team is working on is to use Papervision 3D (an amazing Flash Actionscript based 3D engine) to create online simulation environment for the Residential School project. Along the way, we came across with Andy Zupko's "Dynamic 3D Rendering Effect".

This is a truly interesting application where 2D video clips are re-rendered per frame into m x n pixels and then using pixel brightness level and color scales to determine the z (height/depth) value. It's a truly smart implementation, check it out yourself! Make sure you click and hold on the re-rendered pixel image to the left and move your mouse!

Turning this:

to this, frame by frame:

This is an impressive open source 3D library written in Actionscript 2 and 3! Check out their demo page. it takes a few minutes to download the flash file. But compare to the 50mb+ commercial 3D platforms, this one is quite tiny and fast! I give great hopes to browser based, high quality, true 3D applications written for future Flash players. Way to go guys!

Check out this cool visual effect created using an open source Flash 3D engine programmed in Actionscript 3.0. You will need Flash player 9 to view it correctly. With all this hype about co-developed 3D environment, wouldn't it be cool if one day it can be accompanied by simply media platforms like your web browser? The other way of looking at it, it would be amazing if one day the "Internet browser" can handle Open GL applications. Oh wait, why do we need browser in the first place?

Flash 3D Effect built upon open source 3D engine in actionscript 3.0

I guess Google realized they can't possibly create the whole World in 3D by themselves. Therefore Google released a free 3D modeling software - Google SketchUp. It is a very easy-to-learn 3D modeling application where one can use to create 3D models of architectures in few minutes! You can use this tool for any 3D modeling projects. But what Google really wants you to do is to create realistic 3D models that mirrors the physical architectures in the real world and then upload them to Google Earth. This way, 3D lovers will create a 3D earth for them for free! Great deal eh? What's worth to mention is that there are only two types of files you can export to, 2D graphic (jpg, tif, bmp, png) or Google Earth (kmz). This means it's unlikely you can export your 3D models for other programs such as Blender, 3D Max, Maya or Secondlife.

The first set of 3D game based stamps were released today by Hang Zhou Post Office last week. The stamps are based on a popular Chinese 3D online game - The Legend of Tang Dynasty. There are total of 16 pieces in the collection and the stamps cover characters, monsters, architectures and weapons from the game. This is a very interesting way of seeing some traditional communication elements meet the new technology. I would love to get my hands on to this set!

Hang Zhou, a well known beautiful city in southern China, has recently rolled out their electronic commissioners of the streets - 3D road map terminals around the city block. The public pedestrians will be able to explore through a 3D graphic to locate all public facilities (Hospital, Parks, Market Places and Transportation Stations) within 500 meter radius from the terminal.

Have not used Macromedia Director for formal project development since version 7. Played with version 8 very briefly when shockwave 3d was introduced. I was helping a colleague (John Bratlien) in the last few days to finish a project on delivering 3D models with photographic textures via web browsers. The project was initiated by an Adobe Atmosphere grant. Atmosphere was a new application by Adobe to implement interactive 3D applications on the web. The program and browser plug-in was quite solid except lack of cross-platform support. For unknown reasons, Adobe decided to discontinue the product in the New Year. My colleague then turned to Java to seek for further solutions in delivering 3D objects with OpenGL support through a web interface. Due to a tight deadline, we decided to give Director MX a try. Quite amazingly, Shockwave 3D and director lingo made the project development so simple and we successfully delivered the demo product to the faculty member on Thursday evening. Due to further development is needed for the project, I will leave the detailed descriptions to later posts, but for those of you who are still frustrated with the discontinuation of Atmosphere, give Macromedia Director MX (or Diector MX 2004) a try, it may just save you some time. [to be continued...]