Tag: 3D

Back when I was a kid, I used to love crafting ornate puzzle boxes out of Lego. There would be just one way to open the box, by carefully shifting and rotating a bunch of pieces. Well, either that, or breaking the box in frustration. Interlocked takes that spirit and turns it into a beautiful Flash game. It's a good thing the soundtrack is soothing, because the game itself can get pretty ...

The Khronos Group has finally put its stamp on the WebGL 1.0 spec, and that's good news for those of you running Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, and any other up-to-date WebKit browsers. If you're an Internet Explorer user, however, you're still not invited to the party. Microsoft, with IE9 only being available for Windows Vista and 7, is perfectly content with IE9's DirectX-based hardware ...

Adobe recently announced that Flash Player 11 would feature some impressive upgrades -- including new hardware accelerated 3D graphics APIs. Currently, Flash 10.1 can render a few thousand polygons at 30 FPS. The updated 3D kung fu allows Flash 11 to easily render hundreds of thousands of polygons at 60 FPS, which is obviously a massive improvement. End users won't notice much difference ...

It's not often that I see 3D attempted in Flash, and to be honest, after playing A Small Car I can see why. It's not that it's not a fun game – otherwise I wouldn't mention it as a potential Time Waster. It's just very frustrating. Your job is to steer a car over a complex course, hanging in mid-air, to the checkered "landing zone" at the end of each level. You sometimes need to jump, ...

It's amazing it took this long for Canonical to confirm, but it seems that Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal will ship with both a fancy, OpenGL-accelerated version of Unity, and a flatter, slightly more sedate 2D version for older, unaccelerated hardware. A couple more images of the 2D UI are available after the break. Given the fact that one of the most common targets for Linux installations is on ...

At $1.99 in the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, SurfCube is hard to pass up. The app takes the stock WP7 browser and builds a 3D cube interface around it. The main browser window is front and center and you can shake or flick to rotate the cube and display SurfCube's other screens -- like settings, tabs, and favorites. SurfCube can also be set to run under your lockscreen, which makes it easier to ...

Google has just released version 5.0 of Google Maps for Android, and it might be the most significant update in the five-year history of Google's mobile maps app. For the first time the, Google Maps mobile app features 3D maps and an offline mode, making it both cooler-looking and more useful for Android users. Maps are now dynamically drawn as vectors, instead of stitched together from static ...

Okay, so we're not quite at the point where you're going to be playing the next Crysis sequel in your browser, but still -- the arrival of WebGL in Chrome's beta channel is kind of a big deal. Apart from being able to play around with cool demos like the ones offered up by Google in its official announcement, WebGL is another important step in bringing more desktop-like functionality to the Web. ...

Google Earth just got a whole lot more realistic with the release of Google Earth 6. The new version of Google's gorgeous "digital atlas" integrates Street View and adds 3D trees, making browsing Google Earth even closer to actually being there. The trees have been added to Google Earth's existing 3D environment, while Street View has basically been dropped on top of it. You can activate ...

The Internet, through thick and thin, has always had one stalwart companion: porn. It's a recurring theme throughout history, in fact: where there is new technology, there is porn -- and games. Before big money even thinks about investing there must be a proof of concept -- and that responsibility inexorably falls to porn and games. In this case, games actually came first (I played ...

Side View Generator is a clever little Web application that turns words into other words. So, ... what's so clever about that? You feed it with a word or two (up to ten letters), and it does its magic by taking your text and creating it in 3D. This is the tricky part, really: each letter is composed of multiple voxels, and each voxel is located at a certain point in 3D space. Viewed from one ...

The next version of Flash, amidst growing competition from emerging 3D-in-the-browser technologies WebGL and O3D, will feature support for 3D graphics. But don't get too excited just yet -- we'll probably have to wait until October and the Adobe MAX 2010 conference before we find out more. There, on October 27th, a Flash player engineer will give a talk about "the next-generation 3D API coming ...

First, as always: this isn't confirmed by Microsoft. Still, enough tech blogs have picked it up, so I'm probably safe enough to run it. With that out of the way: OMG! Windows 8 details! Juicy, thigh-wetting details! For now we only have two slides with atrocious grammar (are these really legitimate?), but the source says he'll have more information soon. The first slide is above and the second ...

I know, I know, Zelda games are sacred. It's like trying to cover a Michael Jackson song -- you can give it your best shot, but you can't improve on something perfect, so why bother? Well, you do it for fun of course! Zelda II FPS is a delightful, painstakingly recreated version of the 1987 side-scrolling classic. No expense has been spared -- all of the original textures are there, and the ...

digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/06/09/sculptris-is-insanely-cool-free-3d-modeling-software/'; Sculptris is, without question, the coolest thing I have seen all day. What was supposed to be a short spin became an hour of prodding and playing around with every tool of this incredible creation. In simple terms, it's sculpting software. It's free, and it's accessible. I once ...