So far the year of 2010 has been quite an interesting one, far from boring, and overloaded enough to keep us busy.

Some of the challenges we have tackled so far include; dabbling in some futuristic ways to entertain the end user through Augmented reality; diving deep into flash and experimenting with 3D and its ability to take flash to the next level; further improving our studio websites and the awesomeness of Google indexing with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality defines the means of a live direct or indirect view of the physical real world environment whose elements are augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery, meaning that information is collected about the users environment and digital computer imagery is layered in among it to appear as if it actually exists in the users world even though it is purely computer generated.

An example being, imagine those old pop-up children books, with augmented reality, you replace those paper cut outs with computer imagery which comes to life and can reenact the story on the pages right before your eyes in 3D.

There are indeed many forms of Augmented reality and it is being used for more and more things as the technology matures.

If you want to find out how we implemented one form of augmented reality, check out Aldrich’s wacky explanations on the subject and see what we did for our Christmas card.

Taking Flash into 3D

Through our endeavour of Augmented reality, we came to establish new and exiting ways to deploy flash applications with the use of three dimensional (3D) objects, enriching the users experience.

3D in flash is not a true form of 3D, rather an attempt to create 3D perspective within an 2D environment to give the illusion that it is 3D.

It works by drawing 2D shapes broken up into triangles which are scaled by a z-depth value, which in turn is used to establish a layered display system so that objects that should appear in the background are prevented from being displayed in front of foreground elements.

Some major draw backs to this approach include: performance, which limits how complex a scene can get, and object mesh intersection, the z-depth layer system requires objects to have more smaller triangles in order to prevent object mesh from being drawn on top of each other.

As we where exploring more possibilities, we received a new website project, and straight away we new it was going to be 3D.

Yes, it was a special moment for all of us, and we cant wait to get stuck into more projects utilising 3D in flash.

SEO and Google Indexing

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of driving quality Internet traffic to a website and improving the volume of website linking and search engine rankings.

What this means is, through the use various procedures, you are able to receive improved search results for your websites through the various search engines available to users and increase your sites indexed rankings within search engines such as google so that it appears higher up on the list of search results.

There are various strategies of SEO which are used to improve website marketing and increase the user traffic to websites and the products that they offer.

Stay tuned for more fascinating projects and technical developments.